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MR. PLAYBOY

Hugh Hefner and the American Dream

STEVEN WATTS

WILEY

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

For Olivia Claire Watts

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Watts, Steven, date.

Mr. Playboy : Hugh Hefner and the American dream / Steven Watts.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISRN 978-0-471-69059-7 (cloth)

1. Hefner, Hugh M. (Hugh Marston), 1926- 2. Journalists — United States —
Biography. I. Title.

PN4874.H454W38 2008

070.5092— dc22

[B]

2008009572

Printed in the United States of America

10 98765432

The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is
more real than reality. . . . We risk being the first people in
history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid,
so persuasive, so “realistic” that they can live in them.

— Daniel Boorstin, The Image

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being
looked at.

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island,
sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. ... So he
invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-
old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception
he was faithful to the end.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

When an interviewer asked my mother whether she was
proud of me, she answered, “Oh, yes, but I would have
been just as happy if he’d been a missionary.” Later,

I told her, “But Mom, I was!”

— Hugh Hefner, interview with the author

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The Boy Next Door 1

PARTI BEGINNINGS

1 A Boy at Play 11

2 Boot Camp, College, and Kinsey 34

3 The Tie That Binds 49

PART II ASCENT

4 How to Win Friends and Titillate People 69

5 Hedonism, Inc. 85

6 The Pursuit of Happiness 105

7 An Abundant Life 123

8 Living the Fantasy 143

CONTENTS

PARTIN TRIUMPH

9 The Philosopher King 169

10 The Happiness Explosion 187

1 1 Make Love, Not War 206

12 What Do Women Want? 228

13 Down the Rabbit Hole 250

14 Disneyland for Adults 272

PART IV MALAISE

15 A Hutch Divided 297

16 The Dark Decade 323

17 The Party’s Over 346

18 Strange Bedfellows 367

PART V RESURGENCE

19 The Bride Wore Clothes 391

20 All in the Family 407

21 Back in the Game 426

Epilogue: Playboy Nation 447

Notes 455

Index 515

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have accumulated many debts in completing this book over the last
I few years, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge them. First, I would
I like to thank all of the (male) acquaintances, associates, and even
strangers who have rushed forward over the past few years offering to
assist me with research, carry my luggage, double-check my sources,
take dictation, or wash my rental car when I visited the Playboy
Mansion. This outpouring of selflessness, generosity, and friendship
has revived my faith in human nature.

Several colleagues in the Department of History at the University
of Missouri — Carol Anderson, Robert Collins, Catherine Rymph,
Jonathan Sperber, and John Wigger — read the manuscript and for-
warded many valuable comments and suggestions. Patty Eggleston,
Sandy Kietzman, Melinda Lockwood, Jenny Morton, and Nancy
Taube, departmental staff members all, provided various kinds of
support and encouragement. A number of talented and discerning
friends, including Armando F avazza, Cindy Sheltmire, Dick and Anne
Stewart, Donald Tennant, Daniel Watts, Steve Weinberg, and, espe-
cially, Patricia Ward Kelly, looked over the manuscript and offered an
array of useful observations. Mary Jane Edele and Catherine Damme
helped ease my burden during the early going by digging up articles
and transcribing interviews.

At John Wiley & Sons, my editor, Eric Nelson, expertly guided
the manuscript toward its final form, while Rachel Meyers and Ellen
Wright skillfully orchestrated its production. My agent and friend,

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ron Goldfarb, did his usual superb job of negotiating contracts,
bolstering my spirits, and providing a sounding board on various
occasions. He has my enduring gratitude for all he has done to boost
my career as an author.

The librarians of Ellis Library at the University of Missouri
deployed their expertise to help me gain access to various materials.
At Playboy Enterprises, Inc., in Chicago, Lee Froehlich and Jessica
Riddle helped me navigate the company archives. During my research
trips to the Playboy Mansion, the mansions staff treated me with
great forbearance and kindness as I ransacked the files, pored through
the scrapbooks, strolled the grounds, and took up more than my fair
share of time at the copy machine. Among the many individuals who
deserve my thanks, I note especially Steve Martinez, Norma Maister,
Elayne Lodge, Joyce Nizzari, Trudy King, Amanda Warren, Alicia
Roote, John Cailotto, Elizabeth Kanski, Rob Colin, Jenny Lewis, Dick
Rosenzweig, and Mary O’Connor. A batch of new friends, includ-
ing Elizabeth Granli, Ron McCabe, Jeremy Arnold, Lindsey Vuolo,
Amber Campisi, Tiffany Fallon, and, especially, Alison Reynolds and
Joel Rerliner, provided enlightening conversation and companion-
ship. Many thanks go to that intrepid band of raconteurs on Monday
evenings who taught me much about old movies, bad jokes, and sharp
repartee: Keith Hefner, Ray Anthony, Rill Shepard, Chuck McCann,
Richard Rann, Ron Rorst, Mark Cantor, Peter Vieira, Robert Culp,
Johnny Crawford, and Kevin Rurns.

Hugh Hefner, of course, deserves my profuse thanks. When I first
approached him about this project, he graciously agreed to cooper-
ate. He not only provided unprecedented access to his massive files
chronicling the history of Playboy and his career, but gave me an
opportunity to get an inside look at his life. He also kindly consented
to sit for a battery of interviews, which eventually totaled nearly forty
hours. He accepted the stricture that I maintain editorial control over
the book, and while, ultimately, he took issue with some of my argu-
ments and conclusions, he honored the agreement. For all of these
things, and more, Mr. Hefner has my profound appreciation.

Two people deserve my greatest thanks. My wife, Patti Watts,
reacted with remarkable good humor to my dubious proposal for
doing research at the Playboy Mansion, offering only the admoni-
tion usually given to children at the toy store: “You can look, but
don’t touch.” Subsequently, during innumerable conversations about

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Playboy, American society, men and women, sexuality, and many
other subjects, she has shared a wealth of insights and ideas that
have enriched the book. My daughter, Olivia Claire Watts, arrived
unexpectedly during the middle of this undertaking. After causing
her doddering father an initial bout of terror, she has proved to be an
inexhaustible source of affection, amusement, edification, and won-
der. She has caused me to think harder about all of this, and the book
is for her.

INTRODUCTION

The Boy Next Door

M ention of Hugh Hefner instantly evokes a host of images
that dance through the imagination: visions of voluptuous
women and uninhibited sex, mansion parties and celebrity
entertainers, grotto hot tubs and round beds, smoking jackets and
sleek sports cars. Such mental pictures, of course, stem from Hefner’s
role as founder and publisher of Playboy magazine. Over the last fifty
years, Playboy’s monthly array of hedonistic messages, which Hefner
has supported with a publicity-drenched lifestyle, has made him an
impresario of sex and leisure in the United States and has brought
him dazzling fame. Like Walt Disney in the movies, Muhammad
Ali in sports, or Elvis Presley in popular music, Hefner has come to
signify a personal style, a fantasy. Like these other larger-than-life
figures, he has become an icon of modern American life who has
made a significant impact on our culture.

But the climb to the pinnacle of acclaim and influence proved
to be a long one. In late December 1952, a forlorn twenty-six-year-
old Hefner stood on a bridge at Michigan Avenue in downtown
Chicago. Bundled up against the frigid winter weather, he grimly
stared out over the Chicago Biver. His life seemed at low ebb as he
strained against the bonds of an unsatisfying marriage, flinched at

MR. PLAYBOY

the unsettling prospect of parenthood, and balked at the thought
of returning to an unfulfilling job with few career prospects. This
unhappiness had been driven home by an event a few days earlier.
He had cohosted an alumni show at his old high school where, along
with his best friend, he had told jokes, performed skits, and sang a
few numbers while emceeing the festivities. An enthusiastic audience
had responded with laughter and applause.

That magical evening left Hefner yearning to recapture the enthusi-
asm, optimism, and sense of achievement of his high school years when
he had been a popular and creative leader among students. But now
those youthful hopes seemed far away. Standing on the bridge, he mut-
tered, “Is this all there is? Where is my life going?” He silendy vowed to
do something to escape the ennui that threatened to suffocate him. 1

While not quite on par with Edward Gibbon s famous reverie amid
the ruins of Rome that prompted him to write The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — even though critics would
later accuse Hefner of starting just such a process of degeneration in
the United States — this episode marked a turning point in the young
man’s life. A few weeks later, he started his own magazine. The results
would be stunning.

Within fifteen years, Hefner and Playboy had taken the country
by storm. From its modest beginnings in Chicago, the magazine grew
spectacularly into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with a circulation
of some five million readers by the late 1960s and seven million by
the early 1970s. The Playboy empire expanded to include clubs,
resorts, music, films, television shows, and a wide array of merchan-
dise. Even more, like Coca-Cola or Mickey Mouse, the magazines
ubiquitous bunny logo became an international symbol of American
life. During the Vietnam War in 1969, for instance, American soldiers
were amused to find a dog-eared copy of Playboy in a captured North
Vietnamese bunker. Hefners vision of the good life, it seemed, had
even piqued the imagination (or at least the libidos) of hardened
communist revolutionaries.

Hefner himself became a media darling. By the mid-1960s, he had
graced the cover of Time magazine and been featured prominently in
other publications such as Life , Look, and the Saturday Evening Post.
He appeared as a frequent guest on popular television programs such
as The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Dick Cavett Show,
and Rowan and Martins Laugh-In. Dozens of newspaper articles and

THE BOY NEXT DOOR

interviews explored his social views and supplied salacious details
of his outlandish love life, including the shifting bevy of girlfriends,
the revolving round bed where he worked and cavorted, and the
glass-walled, bathing-suits-optional swimming pool with a bar built
alongside.

More significantly, however, Hefner also emerged as a serious
shaper of, and commentator on, modem American values. In 1967,
for instance, he appeared on an NBC prime-time special exploring
America’s burgeoning culture of leisure and affluence. Sitting in the
library of the Playboy Mansion alongside the noted Harvard theolo-
gian Harvey Cox and William F. Buckley, the prominent conserva-
tive editor of the National Review, he discussed Americans’ growing
interest in what the show called “the pursuit of pleasure.” Puffing
on his trademark pipe and speaking with smooth self-assurance, he
argued that an older, religious basis for morality had faded and values
needed to be reformulated on a more rational basis to promote the
happiness of individuals. The genuine enjoyment of life in modem
America, he insisted, demanded liberated sexuality and enthusiastic,
sophisticated consumption. Holding his own with these intellectual
heavyweights, Hefner came across, in the words of the moderator,
as “the Chairman Mao of the sexual revolution, issuing maxims for
moral guerrilla warfare.” 2

In other words, within a few years of starting Playboy on a shoe-
string after begging and borrowing a few thousand dollars, Hefner
became a serious, influential figure in modern culture. Yet the ques-
tion of how and why the publisher of a risque men’s magazine was
able to gamer such influence, and even prestige, has perplexed many
observers. Understanding comes with the realization that over the
last half century Hefner has played a key role in changing American
values, ideas, and attitudes. From the beginning, his enterprise was
about more than dirty pictures, more than a girlie magazine hastily
slipped under an overcoat by a guilty purchaser. It was a historical
force of significant proportions.

Most obviously, Hefner and Playboy served as a barometer gaug-
ing the pressures of historical changes in America over a half century.
In the 1950s, the magazine reflected hip, urban dissatisfaction with
the stodgy conformism of the Eisenhower era as it critiqued middle-
class suburbanism, the Beat Generation, and the Cold War cmsade
against communism. In the 1960s, Hefner helped fan the flames of

MR. PLAYBOY

the civil rights movement, the antiwar crusade, the countercultural
revolt, and the emerging feminist struggle. In the 1970s, Playboy
personified both the “Me Generation” and the economic contractions
of the era, while the 1980s saw it become a foil for, and target of, the
Reagan Revolution. Throughout, the editor-in-chief and his popular
publication formed a kind of tablet upon which were inscribed the
events shaping modern America.

Rut Hefner and his magazine also played a crucial part in shaping,
not just reflecting, American values in the decades after World War II.
Articulating some of the deepest social and emotional longings of
modern Americans, this controversial publisher stood at the forefront
of four upheavals that fundamentally reconfigured the United States
in the last half of the twentieth century. First, he helped trigger, and
then personified, a transformation in sexual values and conduct that
emerged in the 1950s and swept through American society in subse-
quent years. Playboy, with its “Playmate of the Month,” sexual advice
columns, and array of erotic pictorials, cartoons, and jokes, moved
sex out of the privacy of the marital bed and away from the responsi-
bilities of procreation, and made it a matter of public discussion and
personal pleasure. The magazines open attitude not only loosened
old-fashioned moral strictures on one of the most powerful of human
urges but also promoted its commercialization. Hefner clearly stood as
the most recognizable product of, and catalyst for, the modern sexual
revolution.

He also served as one of the most persuasive advocates for
Americas postwar consumer efflorescence. As the national economy
increasingly turned from production of basic goods and services to
the creation of consumer products, Hefners magazine inundated
readers with symbols of material abundance. It became both a catalog
for sophisticated purchasing and a guidebook for negotiating a daunt-
ing new landscape of material plenty. The pages of Playboy, along
with Hefner s numerous public statements, articulated a credo urging
unabashed enjoyment of the material goods that were flooding out to
a middle- and working-class market. Addressing a simmering male
identity crisis in modern society in which growing numbers of men
no longer functioned as producers, the pages of Playboy offered the
reassuring model of stylish consumer. Linking material plenty to an
audacious leisure culture, Hefner helped make consumer abundance
an emblem of America throughout the world.

THE BOY NEXT DOOR

Moreover, Hefner stood at the center of a popular culture invasion
of the United States that swept all before it in the postwar decades.
This sea change saw glossy magazines, television, movies, records, and
entertainment of all kinds become a dominant force in most people s
lives in all regions of the country. This process replaced local institu-
tions such as churches, lyceums, reading societies, and town newspa-
pers with large-scale, corporate media organizations that dispensed
homogenized information, products, and images nationally. With his
popular magazine, syndicated television shows, franchised nightclubs,
and movie and musical projects synergistically broadcasting the same
array of messages, the Chicago publisher personified the mass-culture
overhaul of modem society in the last half of the twentieth century.
Even Hefner s passionately pursued personal hobbies — swing danc-
ing and Hollywood movies — reflected this revolutionary trend in
American life. As he often observed, he was a child of popular culture
who, in turn, became one of its biggest champions.

Finally, Hefner stood implicated, usually as a whipping boy, in
the womens movement that swept through America beginning
in the 1960s. Playboy’s erotic images of nude young women made it
an object of scorn among many emerging feminists, who complained
that it depicted females as mere sexual objects. The magazine, in their
view, represented the worst sort of male domination and female deg-
radation. A distraught Hefner — he saw himself as a progressive who
was unfairly indicted as a reactionary — contended that he promoted
sexual freedom for women as well as men. Few women’s liberation-
ists bought the argument. As the debate ratcheted upward with bitter
accusations of misogyny and betrayal, these two factions turned upon
one another with ferocious animosity. As a major combatant in this
battle over sexual politics and acceptable roles for women, Playboy
illuminated one of the most profound trends in modern American
social life.

While Hefner has stood at the cutting edge of these transforma-
tive trends, his influence has worked in complex ways. It often flowed
through indirect channels, for instance, since what was said about
him often proved as illuminating as what he said. Whether it was
Harvey Cox discussing the theological implications of the “Playboy
Philosophy,” Tom Wolfe describing Hefners role in the cultural fer-
ment of the 1960s, Norman Mailer detailing the sybaritic pleasures of
the Playboy Mansion, Gloria Steinem excoriating Hefners oppression

MR. PLAYBOY

of women, Attorney General Edwin Meese denouncing Playboy as
pornography, or Justice William O. Douglas defending Hefners First
Amendment rights, commentators have used him as a lens through
which to examine a changing social landscape.

Bitter disputation has clouded the atmosphere and made it difficult
to grasp Hefners significance. Few Americans have aroused greater
controversy in ascending to fame and fortune. Beginning in the 1950s,
a wide variety of people — journalists, ministers, politicians, moralists,
and ordinary folks writing to newspapers and magazines — disagreed
violently about the merits of Playboy and its publisher. On one side
stood Hefner denouncers who, scandalized by the magazine s pic-
tures of nude women and its mockery of such institutions as marriage,
religion, and family, condemned Hefner s appeal to degraded desires
and animal instincts. Seeing themselves as defenders of respectable
society, they viewed him as a dark prophet of American debauchery
and decline.

Hefner disciples, inspired by Playboy’s attacks on sexual repres-
sion and advocacy of material enjoyment, defended him with equal
fervor. They acclaimed the publisher as a liberator leading the
way to physical and emotional freedom from the gray-flannel fog
of a repressed, conformist society still chained to the anachronistic
morality of an earlier age. The magazine, in other words, became a
kind of cultural litmus test for judging the positive or negative direc-
tion of modem American culture. Emotionally charged disagreement
has persisted in one form or another for the last fifty years as defend-
ers and foes of Playboy’s values eagerly strapped on the gloves for
ideological fisticuffs.

Hefners personal life only encouraged the disputation. This fas-
cinating story of romance, ambition, and sex revealed a young man
emerging from a midwestern Methodist background who parlayed
the initial shock created by Playboy into a powerful position as a
cultural trendsetter. Constantly surrounded by a crowd of beauti-
ful young women, he made pleasure-seeking into an art form as the
Playboy Mansion became a highly publicized playground for promi-
nent figures in the world of politics, sports, music, and movies. The
private man, however, nurtured a more complicated, even mysterious
personality. A set of internal contradictions — a powerful sensuality
and a compulsive work ethic, a hedonistic streak and an impulse to
rigidly control every aspect of his life, a compulsive desire for celebrity

THE BOY NEXT DOOR

status and a Gatsby-like instinct for observing the merrymaking at a
distance — made for a curiously driven yet detached sybarite. So, too,
did his combination of restless intelligence, extreme sentimentality,
and obsession with the romantic artifacts of popular culture. Hefner s
personal complexities mattered little, however, to those eager to
either condemn or canonize.

Ultimately, however, if understanding is to trump titillation and
fervor, the controversial publisher must be approached from a differ-
ent angle. While both disciples and demonizers of Hefner are likely
to be disappointed by this perspective, Hefner must be analyzed as
a historical figure, not merely a controversial celebrity. Viewed in
this rightful context, at first glance, he appears as a rebel. Wave after
wave of attacks throughout his career — from anti-obscenity zealots,
defenders of decency, religious moralists, conservative politicians,
feminist activists — have positioned him as a dissenter in modern
America. Indeed, Hefner himself has embraced the role of heroic
insurrectionist seeking to overturn outdated, stultifying, Puritan tra-
ditions in American culture. In fact, this scenario contains a kernel of
truth. As a crusading reformer, he has done much, in the face of often
virulent opposition, to loosen restrictions on sexual expression.

But the image of Hefner as rebel also misleads. In more profound
ways, he has expressed many of the deepest impulses of mainstream
American culture. For example, he appeared on the cultural skyline
as champion of a venerable tradition in American life, the self-made
man. Rising to great heights from modest circumstances by dint
of hard work and a new idea, he romped up the path to success as
Benjamin Franklin in bunny ears.

More importantly, Hefner has presented a compelling vision of
the good life in modern America. In so doing, he occupies a cru-
cial position in a longer historical trajectory. In the early 1900s,
as historians have emphasized in recent decades, the Victorian
restraints of the nineteenth century steadily eroded as the mass of
Americans gradually replaced a traditional code of self-control with
a new creed emphasizing emotional, physical, and material gratifica-
tion. Then the privations of the Great Depression and World War II
stunted the process, creating a great cultural reservoir of pent-up
material and emotional desires. In the postwar era it shot forward
once again, and Hefner emerged as perhaps the leading popular
philosopher of a revived, intensified culture of self-fulfillment for

MR. PLAYBOY

an audience yearning for gratification. He seductively portrayed the
pursuit of happiness as a combination of physical pleasure, leisure
entertainment, and consumer enjoyment. Brilliantly commingling
sexual liberation and material abundance, Playboy captured the
essence of modern American desire.

In this sense, Hefners historical influence has been, quite literally,
fantastic. The Playboy dream is the stuff of fantasy, conjured from the
realm of desire by a kind of cultural alchemy. While often flowing
from Hefners personal experiences — “My life has been the fulfill-
ment of a fantasy,” he likes to say — his vision of happiness also reso-
nates powerfully in the broader culture. The notion of having few
limits on personal pleasure is the modern American dream as well as
Hefners. As the historian Daniel Boorstin observed, the enormous
abundance of modern America has created “a world where fantasy
is more real than reality. . . . We risk being the first people in history
to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so
‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” 3

Whether we like it or not, Hefner s vision of America as the land of
self-fulfillment has been realized in many ways. His notions of sexual
happiness and material comfort, pleasure and leisure, maleness and
femaleness, of individuals freed from many of the restraints of fam-
ily and religion have become commonplace, though often in diluted
form. We see in Hefner and Playboy many of our own perceptions
of modern life. We see reflections of what we have become, both
personally and collectively, glimpses of where we might be going, for
good or ill. We see many of our hopes and fears about our culture,
often hopelessly mingled together.

But the process of analyzing the impact of Hefner and Playboy on
American life must begin by returning to the past. There, in the hal-
cyon days of the late 1920s before the trauma of the Great Depression,
a middle-class couple only recently removed from the rural hinter-
land faced the future in a dynamic midwestern city. Their oldest son,
the typical boy next door, would find opportunities and restrictions in
equal portion, and each would provide its own enticements.

PART I

BEGINNINGS

A Boy at Play

H ugh Hefner grew up in a repressive, “Puritan” atmosphere in
which his family discouraged shows of affection. The strict reli-
gious code of his parents forbade emotional displays, drinking,
swearing, or sexual candor, and he yearned to break free and find
love, romance, and emotional connection. This desire finally drove
him to outright dissent in young adulthood and he founded Playboy
as a proclamation of freedom and sexual liberation. In Hefner s words,
“In many ways it was my parents who, unintentionally, developed the
iconoclastic rebellion in me.” This personal struggle not only pro-
vided the seedbed for his later career, Hefner argues, but framed
larger issues in modern America that explained the enormous appeal
of Playboy. “Puritan repression is really the key that unlocks the mys-
tery of my life,” he wrote. “It is the ‘Rosebud’ that explains what my
life is really all about .” 1

Such is the story that Hefner has told interviewers countless times
over the last forty years, and it provides an unshakable foundation for
his own understanding of his life. He has constructed a kind of per-
sonal mythology. Like all of us, only more self-consciously and pub-
licly, he has constructed a view of his past that explains and justifies

MR. PLAYBOY

his present. But Hefners rendering of his youth simplifies a complex
situation. Like all myths, it strikes a chord with its dramatic narra-
tive of a young hero overcoming obstacles and triumphing. Also like
all myths, it is only partially true. As D. H. Lawrence once warned,
“Don’t trust the teller. Trust the tale.” And the real tale of Hefners
youth suggests a somewhat different story that is compelling in its
own way.

In fact, Hefner was the product of a moderately progressive family
where traditional, Victorian reticence about emotional display and
sexuality, while certainly present, was rapidly giving way to a more
modern notion of juvenile self-fulfillment. Only recently removed
from the rural culture of the Great Plains, his college-educated par-
ents had adapted themselves to the bustling urban life of Chicago.
Growing up in the 1930s, Hefner was doted on by his mother while an
emotionally absent father deprived the boy of a male authority figure.
Left to his own devices, the imaginative child immersed himself in the
popular culture of the era — movies, music, radio, and cartoons — and
created a rich fantasy life that gradually took on a reality more vibrant
than his actual, lived experiences. The product of indulgence as much
as restraint, the boy’s fantasies mirrored larger patterns in America’s
emerging culture of self-fulfillment and its desire for leisure, enter-
tainment, and emotional satisfaction. They made him a creature of
modern values in ways that he never fully appreciated.

But the origins of Hefner’s early life were found far from the city
lights and urban crowds of Chicago and Los Angeles where he would
spend most of his days. The family into which he was born, and the
values that he found so stifling, were shaped on the distant, wind-
swept prairies of turn-of-the-century Nebraska.

At the conclusion of a young people’s party at the Methodist church
in Holdrege, Nebraska, in 1911, Glenn Hefner asked Grace Swanson
if he could walk home with her. She agreed, and thus began a long
courtship between the two rural teenagers. This small town of some
thirty-five hundred people sat in the south-central part of the state,
about 120 miles from Omaha. Bom in a sod house, Glenn had been
shaped by a father who flitted from job to job — barber, insurance

A BOY AT PLAY

agent, real estate salesman — in a vain attempt to keep his family out
of poverty. Grace enjoyed more prosperous circumstances. She had
been bom in 1895 to a farm family and experienced a typical rural
childhood punctuated by chores, animals, and domestic dramas. Her
mother was a religious woman, while her father, although a good pro-
vider, was a man of harsh temperament and an authoritarian bent.
This stem disciplinarian rarely concerned himself with the progress
or well-being of his children. Once as she came home from grade
school, Grace recalled, “he passed me in the yard and hit me with a
black snake whip . . . because he thought I hadn’t come right home
from school.” She confessed, “I did not think I loved my father, just
feared him.” Moreover, he refused to attend church like his pious
wife, drank at local taverns, and swore vigorously. 2

Grace, who would be an important influence on her eldest son
in subsequent years, imbibed the religious values of her mother.
When an older brother tormented her, she would shout, “Sinner,
you are a sinner,” which was the worst epithet she knew. She sang
in the church choir, won a public speaking contest sponsored by the
anti-liquor Womens Christian Temperance Union, and socialized
with other young people at the local church. Glenn displayed a som-
ber temperament as a young man — “Life was a serious business for
him,” Grace explained — but moderated it with a tonic of jovial good
humor. His parents were respectable churchgoers, and he followed
their example. 3

Glenn and Grace first became acquainted through basketball in
high school. They both played avidly, and one day the school princi-
pal, as he observed the boys’ and girls’ teams practicing, remarked,
“I think Glenn Hefner and Grace would make a good couple. They
ought to get together.” And indeed, after their encounter at the
church party, the two young people dated steadily throughout high
school. They were serious students who appeared comfortable in each
other’s company. Grace was particularly scholarly, serving as editor of
the school yearbook and becoming class valedictorian. After gradu-
ation, Glenn went on to Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln,
while Grace taught at a country school for two years before joining
him there. She studied chemistry and math at Wesleyan while Glenn
took business and accounting courses. The young couple socialized
by going to movies, fraternity parties, and football games. Upon grad-
uating from college in 1918, Glenn joined the navy to serve in World

MR. PLAYBOY

War I while Grace remained to finish her degree while working as a
part-time schoolteacher. He returned to Nebraska after the cessation
of hostilities and taught in high school and worked at a small-town
bank before moving to Chicago to join some friends. He found a job
with a railroad company and then in an accounting office. Grace soon
joined him and they were married at a Methodist church in 1921. 4

The newlyweds took up lodgings on the West Side near the Austin
district, where several friends and relatives already lived. Glenn
worked as an accountant while Grace took jobs as a telephone opera-
tor and bookkeeper before joining the World Service Commission
of the Methodist Church, where she dealt with young people work-
ing as prospective ministers or in the Home Missionary Society, the
Womens Home Missionary Society, and the Deaconess Society. In
the spring of 1926, however, Grace quit her job because she was
expecting her first child. 5

Hugh Marston Hefner was bom on April 9, 1926, and enjoyed a
healthy infancy. His parents socialized with other young couples, play-
ing pinochle and checkers, sharing potluck suppers, and occasionally
going to the movies. On rare occasions they would return to Nebraska
to visit farm relatives. In 1929 a brother, Keith, arrived, and the fol-
lowing year the family moved to a new house at 1922 North New
England Avenue in Austin, which would remain the family home for
many decades. The Hefners soon acquired a new Model A Ford, and
within a few years Hugh and Keith possessed the accoutrements of a
typical middle-class childhood — bicycles, a sandbox in the backyard,
and a dog named Wags. 6

Hugh’s boyhood unfolded happily. His neighborhood offered
nearby fields and streams, and the Hefner house became a gather-
ing place for boys such as Harold and Russell Saewert, Don Harper,
Jimmy Bachman, Warren Tellefson, and Hugh’s best friend, Jimmy’s
brother Curtis Bachman. They would play in the backyard, ride their
bicycles, or roam their rustic surroundings conducting war games
and encountering snakes, birds, and crawdads. “Mine was the house
where they came to play, and she made us all welcome,” Hefner
noted of his mother. In the early 1930s Grace took her sons and
their pals to see the Field Museum, the Aquarium, and the Chicago
World’s Fair with its proud slogan, “The Century of Progress.” Hugh
and Keith had a close boyhood relationship, playing constantly and
sharing a bedroom. ‘We did everything together as kids. I worshipped

A BOY AT PLAY

him,” Keith recalled later. The boys felt quite grown up when given
their own bedrooms, only to discover that they had been separated
because their nightly talking and giggling was keeping their parents
awake . 7

Hugh developed a special love for animals. “When he was a kid,”
remembers Keith, “he wanted to be a veterinarian, [it] was the first
job that he ever thought of, I think.” At age eleven, Hugh received
a prize from the Illinois Humane Society for his poem “Be Kind to
Dumb Animals,” which included these stanzas: “To all animals please
be kind / Then faithfulness you will find / Feed cat and dog when they
need to be fed / Then them to happiness you have led.” An inter-
esting animal-related incident occurred around age six. Throughout
his childhood, Hugh had treasured a special blue-and-white security
blanket featuring a bunny pattern. When he came down with a mas-
toid infection, he received a present from his parents to speed his
recovery — a wire-haired fox terrier that he named Brows. A little
box was set up in the basement, and the boy donated his “bunny
blanket” for the dog to sleep on. Unfortunately, Brows died about a
week later and the blanket had to be burned. Hugh was heartbroken,
but the imagery seems to have stuck with him at some level. Later he
would note the “Citizen Kane kind of connection here of the burned
blanket” as he went on to create the bunny empire . 8

In physical terms, Hugh developed slowly. While active and bois-
terous with his friends, he was not athletic and shied away from orga-
nized sports. He tended to be reserved in formal situations at school
or home and hated to answer the telephone. A close childhood friend
recalled an incident from the second grade when the shy boy was
called upon to read aloud. “He stood up to read and lost his place.
I can still see him standing there looking confused and embarrassed.
From then on, all the way through high school, he read line-by-line,
using his finger .” 9

Even as a boy, however, Hefner displayed an unusual creativity.
Fascinated with drawing, he spent countless hours sketching crude
cartoon strips such as Cranet, an adventurer who flew from Earth to
Mars; Jigs and Spike, cowboy outlaws; Jim Malt, a youthful detec-
tive; and adventure characters named “Marvel Man,” “the Mystic,”
and “Metallic Man.” He wrote fantasy stories such as “The Haunted
Castle” and “Ratty,” the “story of a big rat who couldn’t be caught
until nature took a hand,” based on a real rodent who roamed the

MR. PLAYBOY

neighborhood. At age nine he published a one-page neighborhood
newspaper called the Bi-Weekly News, which he sold for a few
cents to the parents of his pals. In grammar school, he created two
unofficial class newspapers that sold for a penny each, before mov-
ing on to create a school-sanctioned newspaper called the Pepper,
which proudly announced his role as “Editor and Tiper.” Recalled a
childhood friend, “From the sixth through the eighth grades, I have
a mind’s eye view of Hef at his desk, dashing off drawings and circu-
lating them to me and other classmates for our amusement. He was
always inventing comic strips.” 10

In fact, throughout grammar school Hefner’s preoccupation with
drawing and story-writing exasperated his teachers. Absorbed in his
imagination, he often neglected his studies. “He doesn’t do his arith-
metic, geography, or spelling unless I stand right at his elbow. He
constantly draws,” his fourth-grade teacher wrote to Grace Hefner.
“I’ve about reached the end of my patience with him. . . . Perhaps
you can help. He will not pass if he doesn’t do his work.” After being
called to task, the boy tried to buckle down to the academic duties at
hand and composed two contrite poems, complete with imaginative
spelling:

Why I Waist Time
I think I get to dreaming
Of something I might do.

And I forget my studies,

And what I’m supost to do.

What I’m Going To Make of Myself Next Semester
I will not make my teacher mad,

Because that would make me sad.

I will not draw at all in school,

And I won’t brake a single rule.

But the problem persisted, calling forth yet another signed prom-
ise the following year: “I will not do the things below. 1. I will not
talk to my neighbor. 2. I will not play in school. 3. I will not cause my
teacher any trouble and I will work my very best.” 11

Young Hefner, however, could not mend his ways. In his early teen-
age years he continued drawing cartoon strips — eventually they

A BOY AT PLAY

would number about seventy different series — and to write and
illustrate stories. He had begun to read fiction by Edgar Allan Poe
and H. G. Wells and became a devotee of Sax Rohmers Dr. Fu
Manchu tales and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. His
own stories, with titles such as “The End of the World,” “The Lizard
Men from Under the Earth,” “Dr. Claws Invisible Hound,” “The
Mansion of Madness,” and “Out of the Fog,” increasingly focused on
the macabre, the supernatural, horror, and science fiction. In 1940,
Hefner formed and became president of “The Shudder Club,” which,
as expressed in his youthful syntax, aimed “to bring together all lov-
ers of chills and horror and enjoying good mystery together.” Like
all self-respecting clubs for boys, it offered an official handshake,
password, membership pin, and special “decoder circle” that per-
mitted members to untangle secret messages. Hefner, doing all of
the work, published five issues of Shudder magazine, which offered
original mystery and horror stories. The boys were delighted when
Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre replied to their solicita-
tion and accepted honorary positions in the club. 12

By 1940, Hefners creations were reflecting the pressure of world
events. “Photoplays” consisted of photographs of costumed charac-
ters, shot on the family Kodak, that were captioned to tell a story.
While two of them were Sherlock Holmes parodies, the other pair
were stories about World War II titled “Bill Dodgely and Troop
31” and “The Kids No Coward.” A 1940 comic strip told the story
of three French brothers escaping from a Nazi prison in occupied
Europe, while a ten-page tale imagined a German invasion of the
United States that was heroically rebuffed near Chicago. 13

Indeed, throughout childhood Hefner created vivid fantasy worlds
in which he immersed himself, a trait that would prove to be lifelong.
The boy who wouldn’t answer the telephone or venture alone to the
dentist’s office a few streets away preferred to inhabit a reality he had
created and to entice others to join him there. “I was a dreamer and
people referred to me as a dreamer,” Hefner later admitted of his
childhood. “I had these flights of fantasy.” 14

This tendency had appeared in him at a very young age. Along
with his brother and his pals, he organized a game he called “Clay”
that they played day after day for years. Using modeling clay on a
large table, they created dozens of small human figures and elabo-
rate settings — battlefields, haunted mansions, mysterious ships — that

MR. PLAYBOY

were like miniature movie sets. He invented stories the boys would
bring to life as they would bend and twist the clay figures and speak
for them. Grace later would recount how her eldest son “liked to
fantasize and tell stories and play with these clay figures.” 15

In fact, Grace was repeatedly struck by Hugh’s insular creativity.
“As a child, he found it very difficult to make new friends. When he
was in school, he was a dreamer, and sort of lived his own life in his
own mind,” she observed. “I would ask him who some of his class-
mates were, and he wouldn’t know the names of very many of them.”
But he could relate the plots of his stories and comic strips down to
the tiniest detail. “You couldn’t always tell what was making Hugh
feel unhappy, because he was very much a loner,” a baffled Grace
admitted. “He always lived in a fantasy world.” 16

Keith Hefner observed the same impulse in his older brother.
Hugh preferred to spend time in his room, writing stories and draw-
ing cartoons, when he wasn’t playing. Often shy and insecure with
other people, the boy did not like venturing out. “His fantasy life
really began with the stories he wrote as a child in grade school and
the cartoons he drew,” Keith said. “He could really make his life what
he wanted it to be.” Even as a kid, noted the younger Hefner, Hugh
wanted “his world to stay exactly as he made it, and doesn’t want to
go anywhere else where that isn’t the reality.” 17

Hefner’s fantasies did not appear sui generis, however, but
were shaped by a cluster of influences. Family dynamics and reli-
gious instruction played an important role in channeling his cre-
ative instincts, as did the popular culture milieu of Depression-era
America. These factors converged to prod his imagination and create
a yearning that would motivate him throughout his life.

Like many middle-class children in the 1930s, Hugh Hefner was
molded by traditional forces of family and religion. Since the early
nineteenth century, respectable American families had drawn upon
evangelical Protestantism and Victorian ideology to sustain them in
a fluid, dynamic society of opportunity. The revivals of the Second
Great Awakening had swept through the United States in the early
1800s, creating a Protestant tradition of “moral free agency” that made

A BOY AT PLAY

the individual the arbiter of his own salvation. The crystallization of
Victorian culture around the same time had enshrined a set of moral
principles devoted to individual self-control. As late as the Great
Depression, these traditions informed the way middle-class parents
raised their children. 18

This mind-set was changing dramatically, however, both in the
larger culture and in the Hefner household. New leisure activities such
as amusement parks and the movies had helped break down Victorian
self-control in the early 1900s, while the explosive growth of a con-
sumer economy gave rise to an ethos of material and emotional self-
fulfillment. The Hefner family proved susceptible to such modernizing
influences. To a marked degree, and contrary to Hugh s memories later
in life, not just “Puritanism” but progressive notions of morality and
childrearing influenced the proceedings at New England Avenue. So
too did American popular culture, every variety of which colored the
outlook of the eldest Hefner son. Glimpses of the man who founded
Playboy could be seen in a youngster frustrated by the reticence and
nose-to-the-grindstone ethic of his parents. They also manifested in
a boy who was never disciplined without explanation, who chafed at
even the mild restraints put in place by his parents, who argued with
Sunday school teachers, and who whiled away countless hours in the
company of cartoonists, mystery writers, and movie directors. 19

As Hefner would recall throughout his life, restraint and repression
colored the atmosphere of his family as he came of age. Orderly rules
and sobriety muffled expressions of emotion. Hugh and Keith had to
be at home and in bed earlier than their playmates, and they were
not allowed to play with friends on Sunday, which was set aside for
church and family activities. Grace and Glenn also shied away from
displays of affection to each other and to their children. Little kissing
and hugging occurred in this emotional climate of cool reserve. Keith
remembered, “There was a period that lasted about two weeks when
I was quite young, when I thought it would be nice to kiss my father
on the cheek good night and that lasted about a week. I could tell how
embarrassed he was by it.” In fact, Grace and Glenn buried emotions
so deep that feelings of any kind — anger, affection, disputes — seldom
came to the surface. There was much calmness and kindness among
the Hefners, but little passion. “His parents are very controlled peo-
ple,” Hefners first wife reported. “In the three years we lived there,
I never heard them raise their voice. Never.” 20

MR. PLAYBOY

This atmosphere was reinforced by the temperaments of the
boys’ parents. Glenn, a straitlaced, hardworking CPA, had carved
out a career at the Advanced Aluminum Company and also kept
the books for the Austin Methodist Church, where the Hefners
attended. About five foot eight with broad shoulders and a trim
waist, the former basketball player had kept himself in good shape
into middle age. Although taciturn, he had more of a sense of humor
than Grace and was known to joke on occasion. He found it hard to
talk to his sons, but occasionally joined them in pitching horseshoes
or playing ball . 21

But Hugh and Keith seldom saw their father because he was
addicted to his work. Glenn left in the morning before his sons arose
and returned near midnight after they were in bed. This grinding
schedule resulted partly from his fascination with bookkeeping and
partly from the Depression, when working extra hours could mean
the difference between keeping a job and unemployment. He left the
raising of his children to his wife, which pleased none of them. The
boys sensed a vacuum in their lives because their father was seldom
around for bonding experiences. When Keith told his dad how much
he had missed his presence in boyhood, Glenn responded, “I didn’t
think I had to [be present]. My father never did anything with me.”
Grace also felt pangs of loneliness and worry, often walking around
the block near midnight when he still had not appeared at home. An
industrious, remote figure who was respected, even admired, in the
Hefner family, Glenn was negligible in his personal impact. He was
“a very nice husband” and a hard worker, said Grace, but as a father
“he wasn’t there.” 22

Glenn’s reserve influenced his attitudes toward physical issues and
sexuality. When the family went to a local swimming pool, he care-
fully hid his body from his sons as he stood behind a locker door and
changed into his swimming trunks. He never discussed sex in any
fashion with his sons. Decades later, Keith was stunned when his
father asserted that he had never masturbated in his entire life, even
as a teenager. Grace shared this Victorian aversion to sexuality. Later
in life she confessed that she never had much use for sex. Glenn was
very shy, but “he always liked it more than I did .” 23

Grace shared her husband’s religiosity, kindliness, lack of preten-
sion, and undemonstrative nature. Of medium height and sharp-
featured, with wire-rimmed glasses and a habitually serious expression,

A BOY AT PLAY

this soft-spoken woman wore no makeup, dressed simply, and kept
her long hair carefully twirled up in a bun. As a young woman she
had decided that if Glenn did not come back from World War I,
she was going to become a missionary or a teacher in a mission school.
A deeply felt code of Protestant values caused her to endorse virtu-
ous, plain living, to view wealth with suspicion, and to see displays of
emotion as unseemly . 24

As a mother, Grace followed the same path trod by religious
middle-class women for decades. Although college-educated, she
stayed at home and devoted herself to the upbringing of the chil-
dren. She handled all domestic matters, kept a house that was tidy
if somewhat stark, and prepared meals of common midwestern fare:
fried chicken, pot roast, pork chops, and fried fish. She enforced rules
of behavior, counseled restraint, and set a tone of moral uplift in her
household. She tried to raise children who were, in her own words,
“very moral, kind, giving, social beings, treating other folks the way
they want to be treated.” Religious instruction played a significant
role in her childrearing efforts. As Hugh noted throughout his adult
life, this “repressed Midwestern Methodist home” overseen by his
mother produced a “Puritanical upbringing .” 25

Yet Grace and Glenn Hefner were not simply hidebound tradi-
tionalists. Vestiges of old-fashioned principles certainly remained, but
they had drifted far away from the values of provincial Nebraska.
In certain ways they had embraced modernity. Not content to be a
farmer or village storekeeper, Glenn had attended college and created
a career in the corporate world of Chicago. Uprooted from the coun-
tryside, the Hefners had abandoned the extended family network that
supported a traditional worldview. There was little contact with family
as the Hefner boys were growing up. “I always felt as if the family on
both sides, there was a remoteness,” Hugh recollected. “We were not
close to our relatives at all.” Moreover, the Hefners had surmounted
their modest economic origins, remaining relatively prosperous even
during the dark years of the Depression. In fact, on occasion, Grace
and Glenn sent money to help relatives back in Nebraska. “I was
only vaguely aware of it. I never felt in danger in terms of anything
economic,” Hugh recalled of the Depression . 26

In addition, Grace displayed a modern side that was never appre-
ciated fully by her eldest son. Although a moralist, she was a progres-
sive, educated woman who nurtured a liberal social vision and a view

MR. PLAYBOY

of childrearing attuned not only to religion but to the latest theories
put forward by psychology. These impulses would shape young
Hughs character quite as much as, and perhaps more than, the
residue of “Puritan repression.”

Grace had a remarkably liberal worldview in many ways. She was
a pacifist who “didn’t think there should be any war, and didn’t think
there should be any implements of war,” according to Keith. Far in
advance of her time, she denounced racial prejudice and taught her
sons tolerance. Once, when they were at the train station, another
passenger warned them to avoid an orange juice stand because
a black person was squeezing the oranges. “Some people think that
black people are different from us and aren’t as clean as us and so
forth, and that isn’t right,” Grace immediately told the boys. “Don’t
pay any attention to that.” 27

Grace’s progressive views also surfaced in her opinions on childrear-
ing. As a young mother, she fell under the sway of Parents magazine.
She subscribed to this journal and relied upon its expert advice on
everything from what movies were acceptable for children, to sex
education, emotional training, and hygiene habits. What Hugh later
interpreted as the fruits of a stern, cold “Puritan” ideology — not
kissing on the mouth, skimpy displays of affection, strict rules about
bedtime — came, in fact, from the pages of Parents. There mothers
were told that kissing on the lips spread germs, that sentimentalizing
children undermined scientific training, and that children did most
of their growing during the sleep hours. As she explained, “I was
very sure that what was recommended by Parents magazine should
be done.” 28

Grace’s reliance on this publication reveals much. Parents had been
founded in 1926, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, to
promote the most recent scientific findings in the new field of child
development. Within a few years it became the largest-selling edu-
cational magazine in the world. This publishing venture was part of
a larger Progressive crusade in the early twentieth century to utilize
modem social science in many areas of education — in schools, among
parents, in social work — to create a rational, efficient social order. As
the historian Ann Hulbert has written, “A contingent of professional
men and progressive-minded women led the way in spreading a new
gospel that the child’s fate would no longer be entrusted to God or mere
custom.” They joined in “calling on science to come to the rescue.” 29

A BOY AT PLAY

Psychology, particularly behaviorism, dominated research in child
development in the 1920s, and its strictures filled the pages of
Parents magazine: enhance your child’s development by molding
behavior at a young age, pursue strict habit formation, rely on sci-
ence rather than sentiment. The crack-up of the traditional Victorian
family in the decades around the turn of the century had created
great emotional and social strains in the American family. Now,
with its impressive battery of social science experts, this publication
promised to help young, isolated mothers like Grace Hefner shape
a new generation of well-adjusted, confident citizens for an efficient
modern society. 30

Thus Grace’s parenting, while influenced by her own Victorian
upbringing, had a strong progressive element. Her letters to Hugh’s
teachers adopted psychological language in addressing his difficulties
with concentrating on academic subjects. A mastoid infection around
age six, she explained to an instructor, had created problems with
his hearing and sight but she did not discuss this “handicap” around
him for fear that he would “feel inferior.” “He is unusually sensitive
and whether he has been ridiculed in front of other children and is
fearful of its being repeated, or what, I do not know,” she wrote to
another teacher. “I have been greatly troubled by his lack of adjust-
ment.” When Hugh’s academic problems persisted and he remained
reluctant to answer the telephone or travel to the dentist, she did not
react like a good Victorian mother with punishment or admonitions.
Instead, Grace concluded that this behavior “was not normal” and
took him to an expert for testing. The doctor decided that, again in
the language of the new behavioral sciences, his IQ was quite high
and “his mind was ahead of his social development.” 31

In fact, Grace’s psychology-tinged approach created an atmo-
sphere of indulgence and rationality regarding her children. They
“should have their own likes and dislikes, follow their own wants,
their own inclinations,” she maintained. She listened carefully to
Hugh and Keith and tried to discuss issues in a nonthreatening way.
While stressing the need for rules, she avoided punishing her chil-
dren (especially corporal punishment) and offered explanations for
parental decisions rather than just imposing her authority. In Grace’s
words, “I always had a strong sense of duty — you know, this should
be done because it was the right thing to do. But I at least tried to
explain why ,” 32

MR. PLAYBOY

Hugh was Grace’s favorite — “If we were both drowning, there was
never a question in my mind who she would save, if she could only
save one,” Keith once said — and her indulgence shaped his character.
She listened carefully to his ideas, took him seriously, and nurtured
a special bond of communication between them. “I was a kid who,
from very early on, was always asking ‘why,’ and she encouraged that,”
Hugh would say later. This penchant for independent thinking pro-
duced a kind of self-regard that was striking even in his childhood.
From a young age, he resented doing anything that he saw as an
“obligation,” such as going to the neighbors for a social visit or joining
parents and brother for a ride in the car. He resisted such things if he
saw no purpose in them. 33

A striking example of Grace’s modern childrearing methods
involved sexual education. It illustrated how her progressive attach-
ment to psychology was undermining her old-fashioned moralism.
In the best Victorian tradition, she found the topic of sexuality to
be acutely embarrassing. Her parents had never discussed sex and
reproduction with her, she viewed sex outside of marriage as unthink-
able, and she found sensuous figures such as Mae West to be offen-
sive. Nonetheless, her modern instincts dictated a scientific approach
to the issue. So after consulting Parents magazine and a friend trained
in child development, she steeled herself, procured an illustrated
book, and explained the facts of reproduction to Hugh and Keith. She
even answered a couple of questions from one of the boys’ playmates,
whose outraged mother subsequently telephoned and asked Grace
to avoid the topic with her son. Hugh would complain later that all
he learned about was the biology of reproduction, and not physical
and emotional aspects of sexual intercourse, but Grace believed that
she was proceeding according to the latest expert advice: “I thought
I was progressive.” 34

Hugh’s education in sexual matters received a jolt, however,
from a family scandal that even his mother’s progressive approach
couldn’t explain. In 1931, Glenn’s father, James Hefner, was arrested
in Burlington, Colorado, and tried on four counts of taking “indecent
liberties” with three girls aged ten and eleven. The charges accused
the sixty-one-year-old man of “willfully and feloniously placing his
hands under the clothes of . . . and upon the private parts of” the girls.
He was convicted and spent over a year in jail, while his wife rented
a room nearby so she could visit him. Grace was so horrified by this

A BOY AT PLAY

crime and fearful of having married into a bad family that she briefly
considered taking the two boys and leaving. But Glenn, after visiting
his family, came home so completely mortified by the incident that
she immediately abandoned such thoughts. Hughs reaction to this
incident was tangled when he learned of it a few years later. He felt
disgust at the crime and intense sympathy for his father. Yet he won-
dered what had caused such aberrant behavior. Somehow, emotional
and sexual repression seemed to be at fault. He blamed those who
“were trying to control our lives in terms of sexuality,” concluding
that “the real sinners were people who were trying to make the rules.
They were the Puritans .” 35

Thus the family dynamic in the Hefner household — its juxtaposi-
tion of Victorian restraint and modem science, moral principles and
psychological techniques — had a complex impact on Hugh during
his boyhood. Naturally sweet-natured, he loved his parents. While in
college, for instance, he wrote Grace and Glenn, “Had I the ability to
choose two perfect people for my parents, I don’t think I could have
found a pair better for me than God did. I shall always love you, and
more than that, respect you, for what you are and have been.” But as
a boy he yearned for greater displays of parental affection. Unaware
of Parents magazine and its psychological directives, he blamed the
repression of a Protestant culture. He also grew sensitive to the pain
caused by his parents’ emotional reticence. He listened sympatheti-
cally when his mother, complaining about Glenn’s absences, said
“she was very much alone, and couldn’t understand why he would
have to work such long hours.” But he also sympathized with his
father’s attempts to insulate himself from an impassive wife. “Her
children were her life, as in many homes,” Hugh explained. “What
was there for the father? What was there for the husband?” This
convergence of emotional yearnings, both his own and his parents’,
sent the sensitive boy in search of ways to fill the void . 36

The Hefner family dynamic, however, also created a child who
was extraordinarily self-absorbed. Doted on by his mother and lack-
ing a firm male authority figure, he pursued his own interests with
a passionate determination. “Even when Hugh was growing up, he
was always so intense [and] he’d be miserable if he couldn’t do the
thing he wanted,” Grace once noted. His parents allowed the boy to
have his way with most things and seldom punished him. The only
time he was ever spanked was when he once refused to leave his room

MR. PLAYBOY

and join the family to go swimming. Because it occurred so seldom,
Hugh felt even more keenly the weight of punishment or restraint
when it did occur. 37

Religion also played a crucial role in shaping the sensibility of the
eldest Hefner boy. The family was steeped in traditional Protestantism,
regularly attending the Austin Methodist Church while Grace rein-
forced its messages at home. “We didn’t have family prayers, formal
devotions, and all that, but ... we judged our actions by what we
thought we should do according to our religious upbringing,” she
explained. Hugh was a pious child, although subject to the usual juve-
nile confusions. At age three, he asked his mother, “What is God?”
Grace explained that God was a loving father over all of us, so when
Glenn came home that evening, the boy said, “Hello, God!” Once,
in a moment of tension, Grace overheard Hugh reassure Keith that
God would take care of them. “I was pleased to hear of his faith,”
she reported. Hugh occasionally composed religious poems, such as
a 1937 effort titled “Easter” that described Christs ascension to
Heaven. 38

But boyhood piety gave way to adolescent skepticism. Grace and
Glenn insisted that the boys attend Sunday school, but a teenage
Hugh resisted after arguing with his teacher about stories or doc-
trines he found to be nonsensical. He asked, for instance, where the
other people came from in the Bible when it explained only Adam
and Eve, Cain and Abel. Once again, Grace’s modernity triumphed
over her traditional Protestant loyalties. She tolerated Hugh’s dis-
sent and encouraged him to think for himself. She even allowed the
boys to decide whether they would be baptized when they became
teenagers. Keith decided to do it, but his older brother did not. And
when Hugh refused to attend church a short time later, his mother
agreed, provided that he attend the Church League for teenagers
on Sunday evening. Hugh admitted that “even though my parents
were very religious, it wasn’t dogmatic religion.” Nonetheless, young
Hefner was growing uncomfortable with the moral universe of the
Methodist Church. 39

As much as family and religion, American popular culture molded
Hugh Hefner’s boyhood character. “Pop culture was my other parent,”
he described later. “The movies and the music, particularly, were
the alternative where I escaped into other dreams and fantasies.”
He went to movies as early as age five and recalled seeing in the

A BOY AT PLAY

early 1930s Smoky, the story of a horse, the Flash Gordon serial with
Buster Crabbe, and Mickey Mouse cartoons. Detective stories, hor-
ror fiction, comic strips, and adventure tales all inspired his juvenile
imagination as images of Little Orphan Annie, Jack Armstrong, Tom
Mix, Buck Rogers, and Dick Tracy danced in his head. 40

Hugh cherished particular favorites. He idolized the cartoonist
Milton Caniff, creator of the comic strip Terry and the Pirates. Pat
Ryan, the protagonist, was a debonair adventurer whose pipe-smoking
later inspired Hefner to take up the habit. The movie Tarzan and His
Mate also left a big imprint. The boy imbibed its images of virtuous
nature, rapacious white hunters, and benevolent jungle creatures.
“What do you get from animals that you don’t get from people all the
time?” Hefner explained. “Non-judgmental love.” 41

Indeed, movies became his greatest boyhood passion. He would
go to local theaters two or three times a week, sometimes seeing a
double feature in the afternoon with his brother and then another
with his parents in the evening. He loved mystery films, horror
films, and westerns, but musicals inspired his greatest devotion.
Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s he sat enthralled by Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald,
and the Busby Berkeley films. He had boyhood crushes on stars such
as Alice Faye, Betty Grable, and Deanna Durbin. The reason musicals
had such a powerful impact, he later concluded, was that “you could
say things in the lyrics of songs that you couldn’t express any other
way — to begin a romance, to express lost love, and ... to feel the
dreams and the yearnings.” In musicals, he believed, “What you are
trying to do is fill that yearning to be loved.” 42

Popular culture filled an emotional void in the boy’s life. Craving
more affection than he was receiving at home, he embraced the
intensely romantic images and music found in the Hollywood musi-
cals of the Depression era. This bright, sensitive child saw the movies
as a way to connect with life . In the darkened theater, he recalled years
later, “You could be transported to another world — the world of the
imagination. And that, in turn was then reflected in the life that was
most important to me, which was the life of my own imagination.” 43
Thoroughly caught up in America’s modern culture of self-
fulfillment, this midwestern youth moved toward adulthood. Entering
high school, he did not yet know that it would be a golden age in his
life, one he would ever after try to recapture.

MR. PLAYBOY

III

Hugh Hefner enrolled at Steinmetz High School in January 1940.
Although colored by typical adolescent angst, it unfolded as a remark-
ably positive period, with two events proving crucial. First, he became
the leader of a social group of close friends, and second, around
age seventeen, he created the persona of an imaginative, romantic
figure whose fantasies dominated the endeavors of his pals. In impor-
tant ways, this became a template for his life.

Bursting with energy, the teenager plunged headlong into numer-
ous school activities that allowed his creativity to flower. Journalism
provided one outlet. As a sophomore he started a small paper called
the Hour Glass , and the following year he began working as a reporter,
cartoonist, and circulation manager for the regular school paper,
the Steinmetz Star. Theater also attracted Hefner, and he appeared
in several school plays. He also wrote, directed, and appeared in a
fifteen-minute horror film titled “Return from the Dead” that was
shot with a 16-millimeter camera borrowed from a neighbor and fea-
tured two of his best friends. 44

More importantly, however, he created a gang of close friends.
It began with Hefners strong friendship with Jim Brophy. The two
boys had known one another since grade school, but in high school
the bond between them became unbreakable. They presented differ-
ent personalities. Brophy, a whiz at science and an excellent student,
pursued ham radio as a hobby and won several science awards at
Steinmetz. He would graduate fourth in a class of just over two hun-
dred and would go on to forge a career as a physics professor. Hefner,
while very bright, tended to be a lackadaisical student who poured
his energy into creative endeavors such as writing, acting, and car-
tooning. But the pair shared great intelligence along with an absurd,
slapstick sense of humor. “[We] thought each other to be hysterically
funny,” Brophy recalled. “Our personalities were veiy different, but
we sparked each others imaginations.” Hefner described them as
the “Hope and Crosby” of Steinmetz High as they played off of one
another with jokes and gags. They even dressed similarly with flannel
or checkered shirts and saddle shoes. 45

The Hefner-Brophy friendship became the focal point of a
Steinmetz group who began hanging out together by 1942. Composed
equally of boys and girls, the gang included Hefner and Dorothy

A BOY AT PLAY

Novak, Jim Brophy and Janie Borson, Betty Conklin and Bob
Clousten, and Dorothy Diephouse and Bob Haugland. They went
to movies and dances, played jazz records, threw parties with inno-
cent kissing games, and drove around in cars borrowed from parents,
and Hefners identity became wrapped up in what he described as
“the whole beautiful gang.” But little of the fun happened at the
Hefner household. According to Brophy, it was “dark and dull . . .
[and] there was not warmth or real interchange in that household.
I think that’s one reason why Hef lived so intensely in our little circle
of friends.” 46

Then came a dramatic change in Hefners life. In the summer
before his junior year, he had become interested in Betty Conklin, an
outgoing girl who played the drums and idolized Gene Krupa. He saw
her as the ultimate coed and they learned to jitterbug together, but
when school started, she invited someone else to a hayride. Hefner
was crushed and carried a torch for many years. Determined to make
himself more attractive and popular, he decided on a personal over-
haul. He began to refer to himself as “Hef,” adopted a more stylish
wardrobe and suave manner, improved his dancing, began using hip
expressions, and, in his words, “became the imaginary adolescent,
the teenager that I wanted to be.” Wri t ing in 1942, he described this
new persona as

a lanky, Sinatra-like guy with a love for loud flannel shirts and
cords in the way of garb, and jive for music. He looks and acts a
lot like a High School kid you’d see in a movie. A very original
fellow, he has his own style of jiving and slang expressions. . . .

He calls everyone “Slug” or “Fiend” and his pet expression is
“Jeeps Creeps.” 47

This personal reinvention made Hefner one of the most popular
students at Steinmetz High. Teaming with Jim Brophy, he emerged
as a social leader whose gang became an elite group. “To be associ-
ated with the famous team of ‘Hefner-Brophy’ was, for me, to be at
the highest social pinnacle in the school,” Janie Sellers wrote Hefner
many years later. “Together, I felt that you ran the whole school.”
Indeed, Hefner took center stage at Steinmetz. Increasingly popu-
lar, he parlayed his energy and creativity into election as president
of the Student Council at the start of his senior year. Eventually, his

MR. PLAYBOY

classmates voted him among the top three in the categories of “Most
Likely to Succeed,” “Most Popular Boy,” “Class Humorist,” “Best
Orator,” “Best Dancer,” and “Most Artistic.” 48

At this time, Hefner also began a project that would preoccupy
him for the rest of his life. He began to chronicle his experiences in a
cartoon autobiography. Inventing a character for himself called “Goo
Heffer,” the youth composed dozens of comic strips that followed
every twist and turn in his gangs activities in funny, charming, and
occasionally poignant style. Sometimes he fictionalized their encoun-
ters a bit to add drama or humor. Hefner would pass the strips around
among the group, who enjoyed them immensely, before carefully
pasting them into scrapbooks. The adolescent justified the project on
several grounds: he liked to draw, he often found school to be boring,
it would entertain his friends, and it would provide an interesting
record of his teenage years to look back on in later life. 49

But there were also deeper impulses at work. Quite self-consciously,
the cartoons centered on the author, self-described variously as
“our hero,” a “Sinatra-type of guy,” or “the type of high school kid
you would see in the movies.” They made Hefner the pivot around
which the gang revolved, and his descriptions of their life became
the prevailing ones. “Hef always had a strong interest in self,” noted
Brophy. “He loved living in his imagination.” At some level, Hefner
was aware of this self-promotion. “In the comic book, you create a
world in which the hero of the story is you, and you include your
friends in the story,” he observed later. “And you pass it around, and
you are the center of that little world that you created.” Hefners
vibrant imagination also came into play. While based on real people
and events, the stories offered a narrative where, in his own words,
“The truth is twisted to make a better comic. . . . And with the char-
acters the same thing is true.” This blurring of fact and fantasy, he
admitted, “may be confusing, especially since photographs of a lot
of them [his friends] are put here. And well admit it is difficult to
photograph a fictional character. Well, I’m confused too.” 50

Hefner s talent for imaginative recreation gained strength from his
immersion in popular culture. His adolescent interests ran the gamut
of pop culture venues in 1940s America: swing dancing and music,
cartoons and radio plays, slick paper magazines, and Hollywood
movies. The teenager loved the big band music of Glenn Miller,
Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James and even wrote a swing tune

A BOY AT PLAY

titled “The A-Card Blues.” He became a crusader for student rights
regarding music and dancing, complaining publicly about the staid
school dances. “The majority of the students who dance prefer jive,
but the moment you start even a simple jive break, someone steps up
and stops you,” he grumbled. “If the Friday night dances are for us
students, why not give us the kind of music we enjoy?” As president
of the Student Council, he worked unsuccessfully to have a jukebox
placed in the cafeteria so students could dance during lunch hour.
An article titled “A Saga in Jive” by “Hep Hef” playfully related a
story in jive talk. “If you Stein studes are really hep you ought to be
able to dig the jive talk,” he wrote. “I say you are a bunch of squares.
Well, lets see.” 51

Hefner also began exhibiting a trait that would define much of his
adult life — a powerful attraction to females. He displayed a dawning
awareness of sexuality that, while steeped in innocence and romance,
veered close to obsession. The introverted youngster had several
schoolboy crushes on various girls before finally taking one of them
to see a movie in eighth grade on his first real date. During his first
two years of high school, Hefner was attracted to a pretty girl named
Beverly Allen, whom he fell for when she kissed him while playing
Post Office at a party. The next few years saw a parade of high school
girlfriends: Betty Conklin, Edith Biowski, Dorothy Novak. 52

As his interest in the opposite sex flowered, the adolescent Hefner
bridled at social restrictions regarding the mysterious, yet compelling
area of sex. A 1938 article in Life magazine, titled “A Tragedy of
Youth,” had made a deep impression. It told the sad tale of a teen-
age boy and girl in New York City who, after she became pregnant,
made a suicide pact that produced one death and a murder trial for
the survivor. The story resonated with twelve-year-old Hefner, who,
while not completely understanding the issues, saw it as an example
of social rules that created misery rather than happiness. The follow-
ing year he saw the rerun of a pre-code film with his mother. When
one of the female characters made a suggestive remark, Grace whis-
pered, “Well, they couldn’t get away with that today.” Hugh thought
silently, “Gee, I wish they could.” In high school, he argued with
his mother about the wisdom and propriety of having sex with girls.
Grace insisted that “you run the risk of bringing a life into the world
that you have no way of taking care of, and you don’t have the right.”
Her eldest son contended that since pregnancy could be avoided,

MR. PLAYBOY

sexual relations should be permitted. Even as a teenager, Hefner
chafed against authority and its proscription of sex. 53

Meanwhile, Hefners growing interest in females and sexuality
found an enticing outlet. In the eighth grade he discovered Esquire
magazine in the basement of a girlfriends house — her father was a
subscriber — and started to read old copies of this mens magazine. He
became particularly fascinated with the pinup drawings by George
Petty, whose lush, idealized depictions of women in various states of
undress had begun to appear in the magazine in 1933. He started col-
lecting “Petty Girls” and hanging them on the walls of his bedroom.
A bit later he discovered pinups drawn by the artist Alberto Vargas,
also in Esquire, and began adding “Vargas Girls” to his collection.
Grace disapproved, but her modem sensibility overcame her religious
scruples and she did not make him take them down. Keith, interested
in acting, had tacked up posters of movie stars in his bedroom, and
she decided that both her boys should be allowed to pursue their
own ideas. “I think for a supposedly narrow-minded person, I was
rather broad minded to allow them to do those things,” she observed
later. One of Hefners favorite Petty Girl drawings portended the
future — an attractive young woman whimsically outfitted in a pink
bunny suit complete with long ears. 54

Hefners actual romantic life, however, failed to meet the Esquire
standard. Instead, it reflected a typical teenage pattern of awkward
advances, flashes of euphoria, occasional rejection, recurrent confu-
sion, and fun. It also embodied his consuming desire to be in love. As
Brophy explained, “Hef was constantly falling in love. ... If he wasn’t
in love, he felt incomplete and unhappy.” But Hefner was no teenage
lothario. Often shy and awkward with girls, he offered a bright, sweet,
energetic temperament and an underwhelming physical presence.
He “was unusually skinny,” said Janie Borson, one of the gang. “That
was his problem with the girls. We were looking for Tyrone Power.”
But as “Goo Heffer” philosophized in the cartoon autobiography, “If
ya don’t get mixed up with wimmen, ya don’t have no fun. So you’re
miserable. If ya do, their friends get sore if ya hit the rocks. And with
no friends, you’re miserable. So it’s evident that wimmen are gonna
cause ya misery no matter what. But I love ‘em anyway.” 55

By the last year of high school, Hefner had gained a little sex-
ual experience. Going steady with a couple of girls had led to kiss-
ing and petting, and occasionally he even got into trouble with his

A BOY AT PLAY

mild-mannered parents for going too far. Glenn became furious one
evening when Hugh arrived home in the early morning hours after a
late date. His father burst out, ‘“Where the god-damn hell have you
been?’ And it was the one and only time in my entire life that I ever
heard him swear,” Hefner recalled. Another time he cuddled with
a girl in the rumble seat as he was out driving around with friends.
When the father warned sternly that such behavior was not accept-
able, the son observed that the edict “of course, gave the whole idea
of a rumble seat a very romantic connection.” 56

Thus during childhood and adolescence Hugh Hefner immersed
himself in a fantasy world that he created from available elements in
his young life. A family atmosphere of emotional repression created
longings for emotional connection. As Victorian tradition vied with
modern social science in the Hefner household, he encountered ves-
tiges of restraint while enjoying a general atmosphere of indulgence
and encouragement. Authority appeared distant, abstract, and vaguely
defined. When strictures were imposed by parents, school, or church,
they seemed all the more severe because of their infrequency.

For this bright, creative child, popular culture promised happi-
ness. Movies, cartoons, magazines, swing music, and dancing pre-
sented visions of self-fulfillment where romance, adventure, and
intense personal experience were the norm. By the time he became
a teenager Hefner viewed his life in terms of a movie plot and himself
in terms of a cinematic character. Restless, ambitious, and increas-
ingly committed to his own fantasies, he desperately sought emo-
tional satisfaction. Like growing numbers in the culture of modem
America, he felt entitled to it.

But the key question, of course, was how to find such gratification.
As he left the warm cocoon of high school in 1944, Hugh Hefner
entertained vague hopes of being a cartoonist with his own strip,
or of working for a magazine as a writer. But first he was forced to
confront an international crisis that had swept through the lives of all
Americans, even those living sheltered lives in midwestern cities.

Boot Camp, College,
and Kinsey

A s Hugh Hefner prepared to graduate from high school in early
1944, he faced an uncertain future. On the one hand, he had
deep misgivings about abandoning the golden days of late
adolescence and his gang of pals at Steinmetz High. On the other
hand, the wider world beckoned. Since late 1941, World War II had
dominated American life, and respectable young men were expected
to enter the military during this national crisis. Young Hefner felt the
obligation keenly. With determination, and a bit of trepidation, he
joined the army and prepared for a new stage in his life.

It began with girls. As with so many other episodes in his adulthood,
Hefner’s embrace of military life became entangled with his romantic
relationships. Just as he was about to graduate, he fell into an intense,

BOOT CAMP, COLLEGE, AND KINSEY

if innocent, love affair with Janie Borson. The girlfriend of his best pal,
Jim Brophy, she had idolized Hefner and admired his creative talent
for years and the two had maintained a close friendship throughout
high school. By accident, they found themselves alone together in
early 1944 a couple of times and several long, soulful talks produced
a passionate kiss. They wrote anguished letters to one another trying
to sort out their feelings, but both were reluctant to betray Brophy.
An unexpected solution appeared when Hefner met someone else. 1

Shortly after graduation, Hefner attended a party of Steinmetz
High kids and met a young woman who had been a classmate. He
recognized the face but did not really know her. Mildred Williams
was the type of girl he found attractive — cute, vivacious, with dark
hair, bangs, and bobby socks. The two talked for a long time, flirted
a bit, and eventually she sat on his lap. Later he discovered that she
had done so to make another boy jealous, but there was a mutual
attraction. By the end of the evening they had made plans to see each
other again. 2

Millie played the violin, was athletic, and came from a blue-collar
family. Her mother was a housewife and devoted Catholic who
regularly shepherded Millie and her four sisters to Mass. Her father,
a streetcar conductor and later a bus driver, had left the Catholic
Church years before. An avid reader, he had educated himself and
became an avowed communist, often commenting to his daughter,
“We should have it as good as they do in Russia.” He also tended to be
very strict, even authoritarian, with his family and absolutely refused
to allow his daughters to date until they were sixteen. 3

Hugh and Millie had several dates during the two weeks between
the time they met and the day he left for military service. He picked
her up from her job at the Mars candy company and they would have
a soda or see a movie. Eager to be in love as always, Hefner fell hard
for this young woman and promised to write her faithfully while he
was away. She promised to do the same, although with less conviction.
True to his deepest instincts, Hefner enveloped Millie in a romantic
fantasy. This relationship, which existed largely on paper except for a
couple of brief furloughs when he returned to Chicago, would sustain
him over the next two years. 4

Hefner, still a boy at age seventeen — he stood about five foot ten
inches and weighed 115 pounds — started his stint in the armed ser-
vices as a cadet in the Army Specialized Training Reserve program.

MR. PLAYBOY

As his alter ego, Goo Heffer, noted in the comic autobiography, he
was leaving comfortable surroundings and would soon “be carrying a
gun as are so many of his age in this age. Goo doesn’t like this change,
any more than most of us but he’s ‘stuck with it’ and so will try to make
the most of it.” 5

He left Chicago in March 1944 for the University of Wisconsin
campus to undergo initial training. Arriving with several suitcases
containing all the amenities of home, including typewriter, alarm clock,
and clothes hangers, he bunked with two new roommates in the three-
to-a-room dormitories. Over the next several weeks, the new enlistees
studied academic subjects, participated in an ROTC curriculum, and
practiced marching. Hefner also lugged along the several volumes of
his comic autobiography, which he shared with his bunkmates and
other cadets in the evenings. Drawn into the orbit of his life, the
trainees enjoyed the comic strips so much that they would grill Hefner
about his high school experiences and pals. One even asked about the
possibility of writing to one of the girls depicted in the comic. 6

Like many young men in the service away from home for the first
time, Hefner grew sentimental and homesick. On May 14, 1944, for
example, he wrote a long letter to his mother and father baring his
emotions:

There is a great deal that I feel that I have never said. There’s
a great deal of gratitude that I have never really expressed.
There are things that I never really appreciated fully until
I came here to Wisconsin — they are the things you’ve done and
sacrificed for me. I’ve felt them more in the last few months
than ever before. . . . When I look back I realize how very lucky
both Keith and I have been to have grown up in a home with so
much love and fairness. In what I would term a “democratic”
home. . . . When I learn of how some fellas or girls have been
brought up with too much discipline or not enough love it
makes me feel plenty sorry for them and plenty grateful to
you. ... I want you to be proud of me. I think you’re the best
mom, and pop’s the best dad, that a fellow could have.

This letter illustrated Hefner’s sweet temperament, but also sug-
gested that serious disgruntlement with his childhood was the prod-
uct of later life. 7

BOOT CAMP, COLLEGE, AND KINSEY

One aspect of the army shocked Hefner, however. For the first
time in his life he encountered social attitudes far different from the
liberal values he had imbibed in childhood. In particular, outbursts of
anti-Semitism and racism punctuated discussions among the cadets
and he found the bigotry hard to digest. He heard nasty cracks about
fellow soldiers who were Jewish and derogatory comments about a
local Jewish girl he took to a few dances, incidents that caused him to
confront the speakers a couple of times. While there were no African
Americans in his training group, Hefner also heard racist slurs, such
as references to the jazz he liked as “nigger music.” In a letter home,
he acknowledged that out in the world “you meet all kinds of preju-
dices and hatreds and it makes me glad and proud to know I have no
such hatreds.” But when he came home on furlough, he complained
that his mother had “created a fairy land” and overprotected him
from the real world during his childhood. She had taught him that
“all people are good people, and all people have the same values and
the same noble thoughts and ambitions,” Keith Hefner reported. “So
that you’re not prepared when — wham! — it isn’t so.” 8

After several months at Madison, Hefner was processed through
the Fort Sheridan reception center in Illinois in June 1944 and began
a typical, nomadic army stint. He departed first for basic training at
Camp Hood in Texas. Things now had become deadly serious, as he
noted in his comic autobiography: “Schooling for death, or for the
preservation of his own life.” He did well in basic training, suffering
injury only from a serious sunburn gained in the oppressive climate.
He won a sharpshooter badge for firing the Ml rifle and made it
through “Killer College” at the end of basic training where troops
went through maneuvers while throwing real grenades, hearing live
ammunition zinging overhead, and completing a twenty-five-mile
hike with full equipment. He also did extensive antitank training
during the last period of his stay at Camp Hood. 9

After a brief furlough in Chicago, Hefner reported to Fort Chaffee,
Arkansas, in October 1944 for additional training as an infantry rifle-
man. After more instruction at Camp Gruber in Oklahoma, he was
ordered to Fort Meade, Maryland. There he awaited processing
to go to a port of embarkation for active overseas duty. Then came
news that changed his army life enormously. He had been assigned
to the “Chairborne Infantry” by getting a desk job as a clerk in S-l,
or personnel, because of his typing skills. A delighted Hefner

MR. PLAYBOY

appreciated this “dandy break” because, in his words, he liked
“Washingtons women very much.” A series of clerk assignments
followed in Camp Adair near Salem, Oregon, and Camp Pickett,
Virginia. 10

Throughout his army days, Hefner pursued creative endeavors.
He drew numerous cartoons for the army newspapers and wrote a
satirical song titled “I’d Make a Hell of a Good Civilian” that his
company sang and marched to. He regularly attended dances at his
various postings and found diversion in his favorite boyhood hobby,
noting, “My escape, always, throughout the army days, was the mov-
ies.” The army showed first-run movies to the troops almost weekly
and he frequented theaters in nearby towns whenever possible. And,
of course, he worked steadily on his comic autobiography, draw-
ings dozens of strips depicting Goo Heffer and his life in the army.
Hanging over Hefners head, however, was threat of active deploy-
ment either for combat or, by the summer of 1945, as part of a force
occupying Japan. In early August 1945, he commented in his comic
autobiography that Hiroshima and Nagasaki “marks the beginning of
an age, the Atomic Age. . . . Where does Goo go from here? Home
or overseas for occupation?” 11

Meanwhile, Hefner courted Millie Williams from afar. From
March 15 to August 27, 1945, for example, he wrote her over eighty
letters. Addressed to “Dearest Millie,” they combined gushy expres-
sions of romantic feeling with confessions of loneliness and boredom.
In a letter of March 27, 1945, he described how hearing a popular
song on the radio titled “Tve Said It” made him think of her:

Music like that, and some of these wonderful nights, really
put me into moods. I dream of being with you. Of being far
out in the country on a cool spring evening in the car, with the
radio turned on softly. Or out on some hillside on a beauti-
ful spring evening with not a care in the world and no one to
bother us. Of course, being a fella in love, I guess I think of
some slightly different things than you do at times. Quite a bit
on the physical side. 12

Hefners infatuation with Millie, however, did not keep him from
dating many other girls while in the army. In Wisconsin, he met a
local high school girl and took her on several dates. He wrote many

BOOT CAMP, COLLEGE, AND KINSEY

long letters to Janie Borson, with whom he kept a strong friendship,
and in one confessed that his relationship with Millie might not
last. “We’re too different in too many ways and every now and then
I know I’m still the same old wolf ’cause I get other femmes on the
mind,” he wrote. While in Washington he dated several girls, and
upon arrival in Salem, Oregon, a college town, he attended dozens
of dances and became involved with at least two young women. As
he would note later, during his army days he “created this world of
romantic adventure” that saw many casual dates but no serious emo-
tional involvement. 13

Hefner’s military career finally ground to a halt with the general
demobilization after the conclusion of World War II. Early in 1946
he made corporal and a few months later received an honorable dis-
charge from the U.S. Army. In May 1946 he returned to Chicago to
get on with his life. 14

Like many other young men after World War II, Hugh Hefner was
at loose ends after his discharge from the military. He attended a
couple of dances at Steinmetz High School to recapture some of his
high school glory, but his pals were gone and things weren’t the same.
He revisited Salem to see the girls he had dated, but once again was
unable to recapture the fun times he had enjoyed there. Finally, he
took an art class in anatomy drawing at the Chicago Art Institute
in summer 1946. But overall, as he confessed, “in Chicago I felt
really lost.” 15

Millie, in the meantime, was attending the University of Illinois
at Urbana, some ninety miles south of Chicago. Although neither
she nor Hefner was quite sure about their relationship — she also
had dated others during his army service — she had accepted his pin.
So Hefner made a decision that met several objectives. He enrolled
at the university on the GI Bill, which allowed him to escape the
aimlessness of Chicago, take steps toward finding a career, and be
with his girlfriend. Moreover, after taking several tests administered
by the government, he discovered that he could get advanced credit
that would, in combination with a heavy course schedule, allow him
to graduate in two and a half years. 16

MR. PLAYBOY

So in September 1946, Hefner embarked upon a college career.
His expectations were somewhat unrealistic. As with so many other
things, his vision of college life had come out of the movies and
centered on “raccoon coats and dances and jalopies,” as he put it.
But the influx of GIs after the war was changing the atmosphere
at American universities as they became more crowded, more seri-
ous, and more career-oriented. After spending a semester living in a
university-approved house, he was accepted into the Granada Club,
an independent rooming house for young men off Green Street. He
became roommates with Bob Preuss, established a fresh circle of
friends, and threw himself into a new round of experiences. 17

Hefner had vague hopes of being a cartoonist or writer. But he
decided to major in psychology because of his fascination with human
behavior and motivation. “I felt that if I could unlock those secrets
and understand that, then it would serve me very well as a writer and
in life.” Minoring in creative writing and art, he performed quite
well scholastically, and was pledged by Phi Eta Sigma, the freshman
scholastic honorary society, and initiated into Chi Gamma Iota,
the veterans’ scholastic honorary society. At the end of his freshman
year, he received recognition for “excellence in scholarship” at the
Annual Honors Day convocation. By his senior year, he was ranked
in the top 10 percent of his class and allowed to do some independent
study. 18

Hefner also pursued artistic endeavors. He regularly published
cartoons both in the Daily Illini, the official student newspaper at the
university, and Shaft, a campus humor magazine. He crossed paths
with Gene Shalit, who worked as the sports editor of the newspaper
and editor of the magazine. His favorite class in college was a writing
course offered by Samson Baphaelson, the prominent screenwriter
and playwright, who was visiting the campus. He had authored The
Jazz Singer and several comedies for Ernst Lubitsch and later would
write Suspicion for Alfred Hitchcock. This wri t ing seminar had only a
handful of students and it met regularly at Raphaelson’s home, where
he would talk intimately with students about his craft. Hefner was
enthralled by this liberal Jewish intellectual. “He was like a men-
tor for me, and an inspiration because of what he stood for,” he said
later. 19

Plunging into his studies and experiencing the intellectual excite-
ment of university life, he received a quiet gesture of support from

BOOT CAMP, COLLEGE, AND KINSEY

his mother. Perhaps sensing a lack of confidence in her oldest son,
Grace decided to inform him that a boyhood intelligence test had
disclosed a genius IQ of 152. On Mothers Day 1948, an appreciative
Hefner wrote a long letter expressing a renewed faith in his abilities
and appreciation for loving parents:

First, a confession: not since high school have I had any real
faith in my own ability, or in the future. The news about
my I.Q. has given me the spark I lost so long ago. I cannot
express to you the difference it has wrought in my outlook, in
my innermost feelings. Egotism is a dangerous thing, but self
confidence in ones own ability is so very necessary to happy
living. . . .

My childhood, my growing into manhood, were wonderfully
happy years. No one is more responsible for that happiness
than you. I remember the long hours spent with both Keith
and me; the time and energy you sacrificed. . . . There is no
way in which I can ever adequately repay you for all that you
have done for me. 20

No bookworm, Hefner pursued a variety of extracurricular
activities during his college years. Football became a passion, and
the 1946 Fighting Illini team had no greater fan as it won the con-
ference title. He filled his scrapbook with enthusiastic descriptions
of the games and heroic sketches of key players. After Illinois beat
UCFA in the Rose Bowl by a score of 41-14, he even exclaimed,
“Who cares if communism is moving across Europe and Palestine
is caught in the throes of civil war?” At the Granada Club, Hefner
achieved a reputation as an intense but fun-loving guy. He loved
playing long games of Monopoly, gin rummy, and bridge with his
housemates. He also developed an interest in airplanes and by 1947
had taken enough lessons and logged enough flying time to get his
private pilots license. 21

Music also occupied much time and energy. Hefner subscribed
to Down Beat, listened faithfully to Dave Garroway, an influential
DJ, and followed the twists and turns of taste in popular music. His
record collection, based on singers such as Billie Holiday and Peggy
Fee, became legendary in the Granada Club for its size and avant-
garde quality. Hefner built and painted a pair of cabinets to house his

MR. PLAYBOY

collection, which he expanded at every opportunity. Dances, of course,
occurred frequently on campus and he attended regularly with Millie.
During his last year at the University of Illinois, Hefner even sang in
a combo with a couple of friends from the Granada Club accompa-
nying him on bass and guitar. Advertisements described him as “The
Boy with the Bop in his Voice” and the “Campus Ballad King.” He
imitated the style of a popular singer, Frankie Laine, and performed
his songs, such as “My Desire” and “A Sunday Kind of Love .” 22

In reflective moments, Hefner wrestled with the religious legacy
of his childhood. For his final project in Raphaelson’s writing seminar,
he presented a gothic play with a religious theme. Its plot focused on
a biochemist’s claim that he had stumbled across proof that God did
not exist, a discovery that led to anguished debates with his son and,
eventually, patricide and suicide. The story represented “a conflict
over whether the world is better off with or without the knowledge,”
the author explained. “Is truth all important, or is the world better
left in ignorance ?” 23

Hefner also continued a years-long debate with his parents over
the validity of Christian doctrine. After Grace sent him a pious article
titled “Goodness and Decency Belong on Top,” he replied politely
but skeptically. Traditional religion was “trying to sell an absolute
standard in moral and spiritual life, and fact seems to strongly suggest
that no such thing exists — that morals are a relative thing, etc.,” he
wrote. While he continued to believe in God, he doubted whether a
just deity would judge people living in the wilds of South America or
the cities of China according to Western Christianity. “I have a much
better philosophy of my own — an altruistic seeking for happiness
on this earth,” Hefner added. “No absolute standards — instead, the
judgment of each act measured in terms of the amount of happiness
or unhappiness it will bring to people .” 24

Throughout college, Hefner poured much of his emotional energy
into his relationship with Millie Williams. They went steady during
his entire two and a half years in Urbana. She lived in Colonial Manor,
an independent house for women, and was already a junior when he
arrived. “Millie and I are going great guns at the moment,” Hefner
wrote to Janie Borson just a few weeks before starting college. “When
she finds out about all my G.I. romances shell probably never speak
to me. But then again, mebbe’ she will for I’ve learned she’s had sev-
eral of her own since I went away .” 25

BOOT CAMP, COLLEGE, AND KINSEY

Indeed, the relationship was somewhat tenuous from the outset.
They had spent very little time together during Hefners military
service, relying on a “paper romance” while dating other people. She
was pinned to another boy in Urbana when she accepted Hugh s pin.
In practical terms, the two had very different interests — she liked
athletics and classical music while he favored dancing and jazz —
and when they played as bridge partners, bickering always seemed
to occur. Both expressed misgivings about the relationship, and a
despondent Hefner once kept a chart of how he felt about her over
a several-month period. He found the highest ratings came when she
was away. 26

But their lust was bubbling furiously. Throughout their college
years, Hugh and Millie would drive into the country and pet heavily.
The sexual frustration became palpable as he would pull back at the
last minute from actual sexual intercourse because she was afraid of
becoming pregnant and failing to graduate. Occasionally they engaged
in oral sex. But both found these intimate encounters — racing to
the edge of consummation, then throwing on the brakes to avoid
disaster — to be emotionally draining. Millie saw it as “destructive.”
Hugh described it sardonically as “a relationship held together by two
and a half years of foreplay.” Finally, as Millie was about to graduate
in the spring of 1948, they decided to lose their virginity and went
away for the weekend to the nearby town of Danville. Predictably,
it was a letdown. They stayed in a seedy hotel, saw a lousy movie on
Sunday, and found the actual sexual act to be disappointing after such
an enormous buildup. “It was not a very romantic weekend,” Hefner
recalled. 27

But Hefner, true to his nature, remained determined to be in
love. Despite misgivings, he propped up the relationship and talked
regularly of marriage. Millie, equally uncertain, went along because
“I didn’t see any alternative to it, to be perfectly honest. ... He
kept insisting that I was the one he wanted to spend his life with.”
Hefner created a fantasy of romance and placed Millie at the center
of it, even when both of them sensed it was overblown. By the time
she graduated in the late spring of 1948, they were talking seriously
of marriage. Even though he harbored doubts about the relation-
ship, whenever Millie hesitated he would reassure her and insist
that she was “just being nervous about the wedding coming up,” she
recalled. 28

MR. PLAYBOY

In the meantime, however, Hefner had become enthralled with
one of the most controversial books to appear in postwar America. It
dealt with a subject that increasingly fascinated him both personally
and intellectually — sex.

Ill

In 1948, Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male. Described by one critic as “the most talked about book of the
twentieth century,” it sold some 200,000 copies within two months of
its release. Reviews appeared everywhere — newspapers and maga-
zines, journals of opinion, literary and professional journals — and the
pollster George Gallup reported that one out of five Americans had
read or heard about the book within a short time after its publication.
As one scholar has put it, “Overnight ‘Kinsey’ became a household
word, his name forever embedded in popular culture.” 29

Why did Kinsey galvanize the popular imagination? Confident
that the erosion of Victorian standards had prepared Americans to
engage sexuality more frankly, he examined sexual behavior dispas-
sionately and presented his results as scientific fact “divorced from
questions of moral value and social customs.” Kinsey and his staff
interviewed several hundred men at great length, asking dozens of
detailed questions, and analyzed a host of variables — social class and
ethnicity, age, marital status, geographical location, religious affilia-
tion, educational level, job or profession — that influenced sexual activ-
ity. Kinsey found a widespread violation of traditional sexual standards
with regard to masturbation, petting, and premarital or extramarital
sex. He delved into more controversial subjects by introducing his
famous heterosexual-homosexual continuum, suggesting that pre-
marital chastity hindered sexual fulfillment, and exploring the nature
of orgasms. When a companion study, Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female, was published in 1953, it showed American women sharing
in the same varied sexual behavior. By bringing discussion of sexuality
out into the open, Kinsey signaled a new era of sexual frankness in
American life. 30

Americans reacted immediately. The Kinsey Report, as it became
known, reflected a loosening of sexual mores that had been occur-
ring since early in the twentieth century. Supporters stressed that

BOOT CAMP, COLLEGE, AND KINSEY

this researcher had merely exposed to view the actual behavior of
Americans and that these facts must be faced in order to forge real-
istic moral principles and social policies. But Kinseys findings also
shocked a middle-class society committed to consumer conformity
and traditional morality. Critics of Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male denounced it for encouraging a degradation of American moral-
ity and mounting an attack on the family structure. More sophisti-
cated critiques chided Kinsey for focusing on the biology of sex while
neglecting important cultural, psychological, emotional, and social
dimensions. But regardless of attitude, a majority of Americans prob-
ably agreed with Time magazine that Kinseys most striking achieve-
ment had been his “open discussion of sex . . . which got such matters
as homosexuality, masturbation, coitus, and orgasm into most papers
and family magazines.” 31

Hefner was primed for reaction to the Kinsey uproar. His personal
frustrations with Millie and their physical relationship had created
emotional agitation over issues of sexuality. In addition, his healthy
interest in girls and sex since adolescence had grown into a preoc-
cupation during his college days. Even as he prepared to depart for
the University of Illinois in August 1946, he joked to Janie Borson,
“Finished my course of drawing nekkid women at the Art Institute
last Friday. Considered continuing my study at the Bialto [burlesque
theater] but the gals move around too much there.” Over the next
couple of years, Hefner became fixated on sex as an expression of
both his thwarted physical desires and his emotional inclination to
create fantasies of self-fulfillment. 32

Many of Hefners collegiate cartoons for the Daily Mini and Shaft,
for instance, had sexual themes. One showed a cop approaching a
male and female student necking in a car parked along the street. The
guy looks out and says, “Whatsamatter? Whatsamatter? I paid my
nickel [in the parking meter]!” Another displayed two guys drawing a
naked young woman in an art class on anatomy, as one says incredu-
lously, “And we get three hours credit for it too?” A more elaborate
cartoon featured one panel where a guy is chasing a gal as the caption
says, “In the spring a young mans fancy lightly turns to ...” A second
panel shows her turning around and chasing him as the caption reads,
“What a girl’s been thinking of all year long!” 33

Shaft, for which Hefner became managing editor during his second
year at Illinois, became a particular venue for his sexual enthusiasms.

MR. PLAYBOY

He introduced a new feature to the humor magazine titled “Coed
of the Month” that was a prototype for the Playboy Playmates. It
offered an enticing photograph along with a brief description of her
activities, hobbies, interests, and plans for the future. In an editorial
column, he noted that while some students had lobbied for a special
“sex issue,” he found the suggestion redundant: “Every issue of Shaft
is a sex issue.” In April 1948, Look ran an article on college humor
magazines and omitted Hefners publication. In a subsequent letter
to the editor, he complained, “You neglected the lustiest, bustiest of
them all — Illinois’ Shaft!” 34

Hefners behavior also suggested a growing preoccupation with
sexual matters. Bob Preuss, a roommate at the Granada House, was
struck by his candor in talking about sex. “I remember him talking
about coming and penetration — he was open,” Preuss recalled. “He
would talk about stuff I’d never say.” Hefner also deployed sexual
frankness in his relationship with Millie, telling her about liaisons
with girls during his army days. Once, he even revealed that he had
petted with one of her roommates, as well as with a couple of other
young women, during the summer when she was gone. Hefner
thought he was being honest, but she saw it as an attempt to gain
emotional advantage in their relationship. 35

Like nothing else, however, Kinseys Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male electrified Hefner. It confirmed his growing sense that sex was
central to the human experience and that Americans had enshrouded
it in mists of superstition and hypocrisy. In a brief review in Shaft of
“what may be 1948’s most important book,” he noted that Kinseys
results indicated that “if American laws were rigidly enforced, ninety-
five percent of all men and boys would be jailed as sex offenders.”
Hefner reported that the book was disturbing because it “makes
obvious the lack of understanding and realistic thinking that have
gone into the formulation of our sex standards and laws. Our moral
pretenses, our hypocrisy on matters of sex have led to incalculable
frustration, delinquency, and unhappiness.” 36

Hefners fascination with Kinsey colored his cartoons. A summer
1948 offering in the Daily Illini depicted a furtive guy in a dark trench
coat sidling up to the desk of the campus bookstore. A clerk says
to another, “He wants to know if we’d be interested in handling an
illustrated version of the Kinsey report.” Another showed a guy and
gal sitting in a parked convertible. Wearing a low-cut dress, she is

BOOT CAMP, COLLEGE, AND KINSEY

looking angrily out of the car while he holds his reddened cheek and
pleads, “Aw, c’mon baby, I’ll never make the Kinsey Report if you act
like that.” 37

But Kinsey also became a catalyst for Hefner’s thinking in a larger
sense. This scientist, in his view, had demonstrated that more sex
was going on than polite American society ever admitted, and that
ordinary people routinely flouted rules and conventions. Fascinated
by Kinsey’s findings, Hefner read everything about the book that
he could get his hands on. “Kinsey had a tremendous impact on
me,” he recalled later. “It supplied the evidence that proved the
things that I had been feeling for so many years, which was that
what we said about our sexuality was not what we did. That we were
hypocrites, and out of that came a good deal of hurt.” Kinsey spoke
directly to important issues in the young man’s life, illustrating that
“‘they’ made those laws and ‘they’ wouldn’t let me be intimate with
my girlfriend.” 38

Kinsey’s revolutionary report, however, failed to prepare Hefner
for an aspect of the sexual revolution that hit much closer to home.
Millie graduated from the University of Illinois in June 1948 and
got a job teaching high school at Lee Center, Illinois, in the fall. She
would visit Urbana periodically throughout the autumn, and the cou-
ple became officially engaged on Christmas Day 1948. A few weeks
later, however, a crisis developed that shook Hefner to the core.

While in Chicago, the couple went to a Loretta Young movie
called The Accused, which told the story of a schoolteacher who
was harassed by a bright, aggressive student who offered her a ride
one evening and then forced himself on her in the car. She resisted
and hit her assailant on the head, accidentally killing him. Terrified,
she rolled the body off a cliff, pulled herself together, and tried to
resume her normal life. But discovery of the body and escalating
guilt caused her to unravel emotionally. Millie looked increasingly
uncomfortable during the movie, and when they went to the car after-
wards she began sobbing hysterically. “I’ve done something terrible,”
she gasped, but then refused to elaborate. After a confused Hefner
insisted on an explanation, she finally confessed to a sexual liaison
with a coach at the school where she was teaching. Still sobbing, she
said that they had done it once, that it was not romantic or satisfying,
and that she was consumed with guilt. Hefner was stunned. Although
nearly speechless from shock, he told Millie he could forgive her

MR. PLAYBOY

and offered assurances that that they would still get married. But
privately, his equilibrium was shattered. 39

Hefner was deeply hurt by Millie s revelation. Later he described
it as “the single most devastating experience of my entire life.” He sat
in his room for days afterward playing records, especially the Billy
Eckstine song “Fool That I Am,” over and over. When visiting her
in the small town where she taught, he would drive extremely fast —
sometimes hitting ninety miles per hour and once getting a traffic
ticket for speeding — as pain and resentment welled up. Overall,
Millie s affair had a profound, if complex, impact on Hefner s attitudes.
On the one hand, the rational side of him tried not to blame her and
held society accountable for holding people to impossible sexual stan-
dards. But on the other hand, his emotional side felt betrayal and pain.
“The episode hung like a cloud over me until the marriage,” he said.
“Nothing was ever the same between us again.” The affair, it seems
clear, encouraged Hefner to distrust women and the notion of com-
mitment to, and from, them. Even though he had necked and petted
with other girls in college, he had never had sex with them. Bruising
his male ego and, even more importantly, deflating the romantic fan-
tasy he had built up around Millie, the affair scarred him for life. 40

Thus Hefner graduated from the University of Illinois on
February 6, 1949, with his personal life on shaky ground and his
professional prospects uncertain. Evidence of disarray appeared in
a decision to halt his beloved comic autobiography. He admitted
that giving up this record of his experiences “wasn’t an easy deci-
sion to make. It has been an intimate part of my life for more than
six years. ... It will be like losing an old friend.” But finishing school
and preparing to marry marked a new stage in his life. “It seems like
a fitting place to write finis. I want to try my hand at professional car-
tooning; I want to write a novel and some short stories,” he wrote. 41

Little of this would come true. Hefner married Millie but he did not
become a professional cartoonist, did not write a novel or short stories,
and did not give up his autobiography. He could not foresee that over
the next few years he would struggle mightily with shaping a career and
fending off unhappiness before finally carving out a path in the society
of postwar America. Only after a period of drift would he create some-
thing that combined his obsession with popular culture, his criticism of
American moral values, and his growing interest in sex. Then neither
his life nor that of the larger society would ever be quite the same.

The Tie That Binds

I n the fall of 1948, a few months before graduating from the
I University of Illinois, Hugh Hefner wrote an apologetic letter to
I his parents. He admitted that he had been distracted and morose in
recent weeks as concerns about career and livelihood pressed heavily.
“Thi s worry about my ability to earn a decent living in work for which
I am suited, to gain a home and the things I want for my own future
family, has given rise to this seeming lack of interest in what those
about me are doing, and hence it seems at times that I just don’t
care about anyone else,” he confessed. But such anxiety was normal,
he assured his parents. It would pass.

Hefners situation was not unusual. Male malaise, of course, had
been rampant after World War II as millions of servicemen reen-
tered domestic life and struggled to find jobs, reconnect with family,
and find a direction for their lives. Hefner had postponed this crisis
temporarily with college, but now he faced the world with hazy plans
and half-formed goals. He knew that he wanted to get married, that
art and journalism appealed to his imagination, and that becoming a
writer or cartoonist would be nice. Beyond that, however, there was
nothing concrete. The next few years would witness several episodes

MR. PLAYBOY

of false starts and dashed dreams before Hefner finally found his
footing and created a vehicle to express many of his deepest impulses
and values. 1

On June 15, 1949, Hugh Hefner married Millie Williams in a cer-
emony held in the rectory next to Saint John Bosco Church. They
had agreed to a Catholic ceremony to please her mother, but because
Hefner was not Catholic they could not be married in the church itself.
It was a modest, blue-collar event: the reception was held in the local
VFW hall with food prepared by friends and family members. The
newlyweds honeymooned for a few days at Styza’s Birchwood Lodge
in Hazelhurst, Wisconsin. Upon returning to Chicago, they moved in
with his parents on New England Avenue because of limited funds
and the persistent postwar shortage of affordable housing. 2

But things did not go smoothly. This was “a time of confusion and
uncertainty,” in Hefners words, as he spun his wheels in trying to
start a career. He initially sought work in Chicago’s newspapers and
magazines, but with little experience and no contacts, “I didn’t have
a clue of how to get started, how to make a connection.” Desperate,
he finally took an unattractive job with the Chicago Carton Company
on the South Side in April 1949 as an employment manager at a salary
of $45 a week. He hated the job, and because he didn’t have a car,
his father had to drive him to the train to go to work. Discouraged
with his mundane tasks and disgusted by the company’s discrimina-
tory hiring policies toward African Americans and Jews, he quit after
only five months. 3

Hefner remained unemployed throughout the fall of 1949 as he
tried to develop and sell a pair of comic strips for newspaper syndi-
cation. Finding no takers, he enrolled at Northwestern University
in early 1950 with dreams of earning a graduate degree and starting
a career as a college professor. “With a masters or doctors degree,
I could teach (Sociology, I think) and write and draw to my heart’s
content in all the free time a school teacher (particularly at the col-
lege level) finds himself with,” he noted. After one semester, however,
he left and reentered the workforce. He found a job as a copywriter
at the Carson Pirie Scott department store in the Loop at a salary of

THE TIE THAT BINDS

$40 a week. “I’ve got a job writing — its copy writing to be sure, but
it’s real, honest-to-goodness, creative writing with art and layout on
the side,” he wrote excitedly. “It doesn’t pay much to start, but there’s
a fine future in advertising, I’m learning plenty, and it’s something
I really enjoy working at.” 4

Six months later, Hefner landed a position at Esquire writing pro-
motional copy at $60 a week. But the magazine that had enthralled
him during boyhood as a paragon of sophistication and glamour
proved disappointing. “It was not fulfilling,” he reported. “You actu-
ally had to check in and punch a clock when you came in and then
for lunch. So it was just a job.” Moreover, Esquire was closing down
its Chicago operation and the editorial staff had already moved to
New York. When the promotion and circulation staff prepared to do
likewise, the magazine offered Hefner a cost-of-living increase but
refused his request for an additional $5 a week. So he quit. In some
vague way, he had decided that his future, no matter how undefined,
lay in the Windy City. 5

In January 1952, Hefner began work at Publisher’s Development
Corporation, a company that published Modem Man , Art Photography ,
and Modem Sunbathing. These small magazines contained nude
photos and had no subscriptions because of fear that the post office
would pull them from the mail as obscene material. As manager
of sales promotion and circulation, Hefner got to know newsstand
dealers, distributors, printers, and the magazine market. But he
found it an unpleasant place to work, even though he was earning
$80 a week, because George Von Bosen, the hard-bitten owner, made
his employees constantly fear for their jobs. So in early 1953, Hefner
went to work for Childrens Activities as circulation promotion man-
ager at a salary of $120 a week. This monthly children’s magazine was
published by the Child Training Association and had a circulation of
some quarter of a million. 6

Thus Hefner shuffled through a series of unfulfilling jobs following
college and found little to engage his interests, talents, and passions.
His complaint about his first job at the Chicago Carton Company —
“I’m going around in psychological circles. There’s no kick in the
work, no feeling of accomplishment” — was repeated many times over
the next four years. But throughout this period of distress, he tried
to express his artistic and journalistic impulses in other ways. He
launched several projects that lay nearer and dearer to his heart. 7

MR. PLAYBOY

Hefner nourished a deep love for drawing, writing, popular music,
and the movies, and yearned to express himself creatively. “I think he
would have liked being an artist,” Millie observed. “I think that was his
first love, art.” Thus in 1949, right out of college, he was delighted to
secure an assignment writing movie reviews for a small local magazine
titled Dale Harrisons Chicago. “Offering us the opportunity to do a
movie column is like picking an alcoholic for the job of saloon editor.
It just ain’t work,” he wrote in his first review. A bit later, he worked
hard to develop a couple of comic strips. One, titled Gene Fantas,
Psycho-Investigator, created a character who probed deep into the
psychology of human motivation to solve crimes and problems. A sec-
ond, more lighthearted strip with the title of Freddy Frat focused on
the misadventures of college life. He had no luck in selling them. 8

Periodically, Hefner tried to muffle these creative urges and rec-
oncile himself to a staid, middle-class existence. In a long letter dated
Christmas 1950, he noted that “Millie and I have bought and paid for
a used car and a new television set. I’m nicely settled in a job writing
men’s store advertising for Carson Pirie Scott & Co.” But discontent
kept bubbling up. “He was depressed when he couldn’t find out what
he was going to do,” Millie explained many years later. “You know, his
cartoons weren’t selling. . . . And then when he decided to go back
to school at Northwestern, he thought at least he could teach school.
But he wasn’t real happy with that idea.” 9

Hefner achieved one notable creative success, however, that
charged his emotional batteries and made him a minor celebrity in
Chicago. In the spring of 1951, he published That Toddlin’ Town:
A Rowdy Burlesque of Chicago Manners and Morals. He had been
working on this book of original cartoons offering a satirical, risque
look at the Chicago social scene for months and was overjoyed when
it appeared. The front cover featured a sketch of a stripper dancing
on a table surrounded by smiling men with drinks, while the car-
toons themselves took a jaunt through the saloons, clubs, and theaters
of the city, offering commentary on its “manners and morals.” Local
newspapers took notice. The Chicago Daily Tribune described it as “a
book of cartoons irreverently satirizing Chicago’s mores . . . with a col-
lection of drawings that look like the kind Esquire might judge were
too racy for its picture readers,” while the Chicago Herald-American
noted that it would “make you laugh if you know the city.” “I hope
it’ll make me a pot full of money,” Hefner wrote excitedly. “But even

THE TIE THAT BINDS

if I just break even on the darn thing, it’s a start, the beginning of
getting a reputation, the all important step in the right direction — the
direction I most want to go!” 10

One Michigan Avenue bookstore featured a window display of
That Toddlin’ Town , while promotion for the book allowed Hefner
to rub shoulders with Chicago’s entertainment establishment. He
was interviewed on several radio shows and appeared on local television
shows such as Hugh Downs’s Luncheon Date and Ernie Simon’s
Curbstone Cut-Up. The latter featured a zany publicity stunt. As
Simon prepared to interview Hefner outside a movie theater, a man
in a gorilla suit came by carrying a beautiful young woman, which
replicated one of the cartoons in the book. The book’s success thrilled
the author. It earned a couple of thousand dollars’ profit and a curator
from the Chicago Historical Society requested some of its original
cartoons for a special exhibition in its museum. “A nice prestige-type
thing,” Hefner noted. 11

The following year, Hefner embarked on another project more
indicative of the future. In the fall of 1951, he began exploring
the possibility of going into business for himself. Along with Burt
Zollo, a copywriter with whom he shared an office at Esquire, he
developed a prospectus for Pulse: The Picture Magazine of Chicago,
and began contacting potential investors. They were unable to raise
money, however, and the project fizzled out. Nevertheless, by late
1951 the idea for a magazine of his own had clearly begun to perco-
late in Hefner’s head. 12

While searching for vocational direction in the early 1950s, Hefner
also struggled to shape his views of the world into some kind of cohe-
sive form. In typical adolescent fashion, this bright young man had
soaked up a mishmash of ideas and theories during his high school
and college years, ranging from Hollywood movies to Freud, popu-
lar cartoons to Darwin, Protestant theology to Tarzan. He had come
out of college with more questions than answers, however, and
upon entering the adult world he attempted to integrate a jumble of
images and thoughts into a worldview that would help him find his
way within the larger society. Increasingly, he drew together several
elements — Ayn Rand and heroic individualism, popular psychology,
Alfred Kinsey and sexual liberation, and sentimental images from
popular culture, particularly the movies — and molded them into a
whole. They became the building blocks of a social fantasy.

MR. PLAYBOY

As part of his flight from the religious values of his parents, Hefner
had turned to psychology to explain human behavior. He concluded
from his college studies that deep-seated impulses in the human
psyche, not sin, explained behavior. “The reason I was majoring in psy-
chology at Illinois and then in postgraduate work at Northwestern was
because it all had to do with trying to understand why,” he explained.
“If I was going to be a writer, I should understand why we behaved
the way we do.” Hefner developed a broad appreciation of how
human instincts and impulses, often buried or twisted into strange
shapes, helped determine behavior. Freud, he recalled, was one of
his idols. 13

He also wrestled with psychological and sociological theories that
portrayed human beings as creatures of larger, powerful social or
psychic forces. He learned, in his own words, that “man was pretty
much an expression, a sum total, of his heredity and his environment.
He could not be blamed for a damned thing. He was just a victim,
nothing more.” Hefner bridled at this determinism, arguing that if it
was widely accepted “we would all sit on our asses and do nothing.”
In a similar vein, he saw McCarthyism and its pressures for politi-
cal and social conformity as forcing Americans to become “security-
conscious, committee-conscious, afraid to be different from anybody
else, afraid to express a different opinion.” He concluded that all
of these ideas and trends were undermining “the free-enterprise
system” and “a free democratic society.” In his view, “Eliminate the
importance of self, drag everyone else down to the common denomi-
nator, and you are walking right into the society that George Orwell
warned us about in 1984.” u

Ayn Rands The Fountainhead became a catalyst for his individu-
alist inclinations. This novel, with its philosophy of “objectivism,” or
the notion that morality consists of rational self-interest, resonated
powerfully with the young man. Its hero, Howard Roark, a deter-
mined individualist, galvanized Hefners sense of self. “It began to
come clear to me for the first time that if you took the importance
of the individual out of society, eliminated his personal importance,
his integrity, his personal point of view, his right to be different, for
the sake of what you referred to as the Common Good, it could
never be a common good — it could only be a common evil,” Hefner
reflected. He became convinced that individualism lay at the heart
of a free society while communism, socialism, and fascism offered

THE TIE THAT BINDS

a suffocating collectivism. In later years, after running an interview
with Rand in Playboy , Hefner would be shocked to discover that she
was a Barry Goldwater conservative. But in the early 1950s, Rands
powerful message of unfettered individualism carried a powerful
appeal for a young man anxious about McCarthyism and middle-
class conformity. 15

Hefners individualist creed, like other aspects of his life, increas-
ingly came to focus on sexual behavior and standards. The 1948 Kinsey
Report had inflamed his adolescent resentments about sexual hypoc-
risy and repression. So when he was required to do a long research
paper during his brief stint in graduate school at Northwestern in the
spring of 1950, a natural topic beckoned. Written for a class in social
pathology and carrying the title “Sex Behavior and the U.S. Law,” the
seventy-eight-page paper examined the wide array of laws govern-
ing American sexual behavior. Hefner looked at a variety of sexual
practices such as intercourse before, during, and outside of marriage;
intercourse with prostitutes; incest, homosexuality, and the statutes
and punishments that applied to them. There existed, he concluded,
not only a gap between American principles and behavior regarding
sex, but a state of affairs where “much of this hypocrisy has been leg-
islated into the statutes of the various states.” Common practices such
as premarital sex, oral sex, masturbation, and “lewd cohabitation” had
been deemed illegal, and if enforced, in Hefners words, “these laws
would send close to ninety per cent of our male population to prison.”
This situation, he concluded, revealed that modern freedoms had
not been extended to sexuality. Hefner blamed Christianity, which
had denounced carnal urges and idealized celibacy, as the culprit.
He offered as a counterpoint the light of reason, which, if allowed to
shine on sexuality, would lead to the decriminalization of many activi-
ties that hurt no one. “Mans moral life, as long as it does not harm
others, is his own business, and should be left to his own discretion,”
he concluded. 16

Even more important was the emotional conviction that Hefner
brought to this project. He threw himself into research and writing,
in his words, “with the all-consuming passion of the true believer.” It
provided not only a focus for his intense, Rand-style individualism,
but a kind of catharsis for coming to terms with his personal pain
over Millie s infidelity and the perceived repressions of his Protestant
childhood. With its twin messages of sexual freedom and individual

MR. PLAYBOY

liberation, the paper captured central impulses in Hefner’s emerging
worldview and presaged many of the themes that he would address
in his later career. The grade he received for the paper — an A for
research, but only a B+ for the conclusions — reinforced his con-
viction that sexual repression and hypocrisy had warped American
sexual attitudes. 17

Hefners emotional and ideological maturation received an added
boost from American popular culture. He continued to nurture sen-
timental dreams of affection, romance, and passion that were rooted
in popular music and movies. Cinematic images of simple, strong men
of integrity and principle who persevered through difficult circum-
stances, as portrayed in movies such as Mr Smith Goes to Washington,
Meet John Doe, and in various characters played by Humphrey
Bogart, influenced him. He secured an underground copy of D.
H. Lawrence’s banned book Lady Chatterley’s Lover and devoured
Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run, the popular novel about
Sammy Glick and Hollywood. He also became enthralled with the
work and life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, reading The Great Gatsby and
Schulberg’s The Disenchanted, a fictionalized treatment of the sad
last stages of Fitzgeralds life. “I didn’t want to grow up and be my
parents. There had to be something more,” he explained. “And that
something more was hinted at somehow in the dreams and the movies
and the books I read.” 18

Thus by the early 1950s Hefner had forged an individualist, libera-
tionist mind-set that was committed to unfettered expression, sexual
freedom, and personal autonomy. He may not have known exactly
where he was going, but he knew the ideas that were going to take
him there. At the same time, his search for vocation and direction
in young adulthood was far more than an intellectual exercise. It lay
intertwined with his personal life, particularly an unsatisfying mar-
riage and a growing sexual restlessness.

Hugh and Millie Hefner began their married life in 1949 in awkward
circumstances. Forced to live with his parents because of economic
pressures, they converted the largest bedroom in the house into a
small apartment. The younger Hefners’ appreciation, combined

THE TIE THAT BINDS

with the elder Hefners’ emotional restraint, made for a congenial
household. The only point of contention concerned Hugh and Millie’s
enthusiastic lovemaking, which occasionally could be heard by both
his parents and their longtime neighbors. An embarrassed Grace took
her son aside one day and asked for more restraint, or at least less
noise. Such minor problems aside, the youthful couple settled in as
Hugh pursued various jobs and art projects and Millie worked at the
Mars candy factory. Hefner seemed content, noting on Christmas
1950 that “I find myself more in love with Millie than I was on our
wedding day.” 19

Change came in the early spring of 1952, when Millie discovered
she was pregnant. Within a few weeks the young couple had found a
five-room apartment at 6052 South Harper on Chicago’s South Side,
and throughout the summer they threw themselves into a redecorating
project. For Hugh, it was an opportunity to realize a fantasy — living
the life of a hip, young urban couple. Seeking to create a Greenwich
Village-style environment, Hefner designed a dark gray living room
accented with white, yellow, and black draperies, Picasso prints, and
spare, modernist furniture, including an orange Knoll womb chair.
The bright dining room had three walls painted rust orange and one
covered in Philippine grass paper. A long hallway featured some of
Hefner’s cartoons along with a playful touch — framed his-and-her
chest X-rays. The bedroom had yellow walls and dark green bamboo
shades, while the baby’s bedroom was decorated with Pogo cartoons.
The Chicago Daily News ran a brief picture story on the apartment
as Hefner acknowledged he was trying to “create a sort of bohemian
life that I imagined was going on out there that I wasn’t a part of.” 20

Yet Hefner’s carefully cultivated image was belied by the reality
beneath. In fact, Hugh and Millie had begun to drift apart. Both
had harbored doubts about the relationship, but they hoped that the
marriage bond would overcome them. Like many young couples in
1950s America, they had felt pressure to get married and have chil-
dren because, in Hefner’s words, “it was simply the thing that you
did.” But they were ill-suited to one another, and the frustrations
grew stronger, rather than weaker, over time. 21

Disappointment had surfaced early on. The wedding ceremony
had been pleasant, but the honeymoon at a lakeside lodge in
Wisconsin fell victim to extremely hot weather and boredom.
Their sexual relationship had cooled gradually, and when a tight

MR. PLAYBOY

emotional connection failed to develop, they settled into a calm but
dispassionate relationship. Friction flared only when they played as
bridge partners and inevitably bickered. Much like Grace and Glenn
Hefner, they coexisted with little fighting but little affection either.
A friend observed, “I saw them more as good friends than as lovers
because I never saw them display any affection, hugging or kissing
or touching.” 22

Gradually, a quiet discontent grew as each partner felt a lack of ful-
fillment. “It was a charade. We were playing roles,” Millie admitted
later. Hugh added, “I have always had the capacity to find the bright
side of almost anything. I don’t think I was ever really happy in the
marriage, but I think that I managed to convince myself that I was.”
The stalled union, along with the stalled career, seemed to signal the
death of his youthful dreams. In looking back at the early years of his
marriage to Millie, he later described the period as “one in which
I was really lost.” 23

For Hefner, two issues grew particularly frustrating. First, he
claimed that Millie had little interest in sex. “He told me Millie was
unresponsive in bed and that he had tried everything he knew to
stimulate their sex life, but nothing succeeded,” Eldon Sellers, a close
friend, reported. Second, Hefner was emotionally unprepared to be a
parent. He had agreed to a family because of social pressures to have
children, and the arrival of daughter Christie on November 8, 1952,
had delighted him. But at heart, Hefner was no family man and, in
his words, “all this togetherness seemed meaningless. I went t hrough
the motions, but my heart wasn’t in it.” The responsibilities of father-
hood had little appeal and the arrival of a second child, David, in 1955
only exacerbated the situation. Millie had wanted another baby and
Hugh was reluctant, so she arranged the biological schedule without
consulting him. “The second child was planned, but I wasn’t in on the
plan,” he noted ruefully. 24

In the meantime, the troubled marriage faced growing pressure
from Hugh’s increasingly active sexual imagination. His strong erotic
drive had become evident on the afternoon of their wedding when,
on a very hot day at Millie’s parents’ house with relatives scattered
about, he wanted to have sex in her bedroom. She refused. In subse-
quent years, Hefner’s fascination with sexual themes and issues grew
stronger. His snapshots of the new apartment included a from-the-
back, waist-up picture of Millie as she stood in the shower. A 1952

THE TIE THAT BINDS

letter to posterity in his autobiography was decorated with miniature
photographs of scantily clad and nude women. Hefner eagerly col-
lected sexual tidbits from the news, noting in a letter the following
year, “Sex made a couple of big headlines this month as margarine
heir Minot Jelke was convicted as a panderer for $50 to $200 a date
call-girls — and Christine Jorgensen returned to the U.S. after a series
of famous operations that turned her from a man into a woman.” As
Eldon Sellers put it, “he was obsessed with sex.” 25

Hefners preoccupation did not remain ethereal. He became a
connoisseur of sexual experimentation in a group of young married
friends. He hosted parties at the Hefner apartment featuring stag
films, which titillated the group, and kept up a running commentary
of one-liners to remove any embarrassment. He organized risque
games such as strip poker and strip charades where, while consuming
hefty amounts of alcohol to remove inhibitions, husbands and wives
would end up stripping down to their underwear. These boisterous
parties, according to Sellers, produced a bunch of half-naked people
running around laughing and cavorting. “Nothing sexual happened
but it was titillating,” he said. 26

Hefner also went further. One night after he and Millie watched
a stag movie with Janie and Eldon Sellers, he suggested that the four
of them make love on the same bed, each husband to his own wife.
They did so and, in Sellers’s words, “It was different and exciting.”
According to Millie, Hugh began to hint at switching partners, appar-
ently suggesting it with the Sellerses, although the swap never mate-
rialized. But it did happen with his brother, Keith, and his wife, Rae,
one evening at the apartment. While Millie ultimately backed out of
having sex with Keith, Hugh slept with his sister-in-law. 27

Soon Hefner became even bolder. After procuring the necessary
equipment, he made his own stag film. Titled “After the Masquerade,”
it was shot at a friend’s apartment where Hefner and a female
acquaintance had sex while wearing masks to protect their identity.
On another occasion, Hefner shared a partner with Eldon Sellers,
whose own sexual experimentation also was accelerating rapidly.
When he took a young woman home to make love, she said she
wouldn’t mind a friend, “so I called Hef and he came right over.”
Hefner’s thirst for sexual experience became so strong that he even
had a one-time homosexual encounter. One evening in downtown
Chicago he was propositioned and, according to Sellers, he “thought

MR. PLAYBOY

what the hell. Found it an interesting experience. As far as I know,
the guy just gave him a blow job .” 28

Hefners blossoming sense of sexual liberation, however, did not
extend to Millie. When Eldon Sellers divorced his wife, his friendship
with the Hefners intensified and he would drop by to visit, sometimes
when Hugh was not home . Hefner bridled. “He told me about a friend
of his who lost his wife to his best friend,” Sellers recalled. Hefner’s
fears were well grounded, because Sellers had become attracted to
Millie. “I thought she was very sexy and once when we played a kiss-
ing game [at a party], she had kissed me kind of passionately, a French
kiss,” he confessed . 29

Amid these sexual shenanigans, however, Hefner maintained a
fascinating posture. While organizing, staging, even choreographing
the revelries, and contributing much wit and good cheer, he stayed
a step removed. He enjoyed participating in new sexual adventures,
but never abandoned himself to them. As Sellers observed, he never
got drunk at the couples’ parties but carefully maintained his self-
control. Millie agreed, noting that her husband “stages things. But
he’s not part of it.” She believed that Hefner’s reserve, in part, pro-
tected him from feeling vulnerable. But Millie also concluded that
her husband, at a deeper level, somehow created an alter ego who
could act out his deepest desires while his real self remained as an
observer. “I kept thinking it’s like he’s two people. He’s this fantasy
character. He’s this viewer of life,” she explained. “It’s this other per-
son that is doing all the fantasy things that he would like to be able to
do but he can’t do.” In a sense, Hefner’s creation of a social fantasy
contained a fantasy of himself . 30

Not surprisingly, Hefner’s restless sexuality finally culminated
in a full-blown affair. While working at Publisher’s Development
Corporation, he started an affair with a nurse that lasted for about
a year. She was an attractive, earthy woman whose vigorous erotic
appetite contrasted with Millie. “She managed to give me back my
sexual self-respect,” Hefner said. “She was attracted to me in a way
I didn’t feel that Millie was.” He justified the illicit relationship as
not being unfaithful, but merely compensating for Millie’s lack of
sexual interest. Moreover, the affair demonstrated Hefner’s growing
discontent with America’s repressive code of sexual conduct. “I don’t
remember having any guilt,” he said later. “I just felt that I was, in
effect, breaking the rules that I’d been raised with .” 31

THE TIE THAT BINDS

Thus the wheel-spinning lack of momentum in Hefners career
was matched by discontent and sexual adventurism in his personal
life. His various forays — the affair, the bohemian apartment, the
stag films, the risque parties — expressed a common desire to jet-
tison the social conventions of postwar America. “It was all part of
the same thing. It was somehow trying to get out of that life,” he
noted. “Somehow to just not keep marching in lockstep to the abyss.”
Disparaging American society as a hive of Father Knows Best confor-
mity, he yearned for liberation. But in both his career and his private
life, the fog of frustration refused to lift. In Hefners words, “I was
really not a happy guy, either professionally or personally, at that point
in my life.” 32

Ill

Hefners discontent, ironically, came to a head in a moment of
great joy. In December 1952, he and Jim Brophy wrote and directed
the Revue of Stars , a fund-raising variety show, for the Steinmetz
High School Alumni Association. The old school chums served as
masters of ceremonies and performed several song and comedy num-
bers, including a hilarious “Walking My Baby Back Home,” where
Hefner serenaded Brophy, who was dressed as a woman. The crowd
loved the show, and Hefner, showered with applause and laughter,
was ecstatic. As he noted in his cartoon autobiography, “Who says you
can’t turn back the clock? For the past two hours we’ve been plunked
right back in the middle of 1943!” The alumni show “reinspired my
faith in myself. It reminded me of my high school days when I truly
believed I could do anything.” 33

But this moment of euphoria quickly turned to ashes. As the
glow of success faded, the experience of the show only highlighted
the angst that had enveloped the rest of his life. He grew acutely
despondent about his stalled career and his unhappy marriage, and
the feelings almost overwhelmed him a few days later. Standing on
a bridge over the Chicago River in the middle of a typically frigid
winter, he looked out over the water and felt a desperate desire to
recapture those warm feelings of high school life when he had been
the esteemed leader of a gang, romance was in the air, and everything
seemed possible. “I stood on the bridge . . . and I felt as if my life

MR. PLAYBOY

was over. I had put away all my dreams from childhood and I was
miserable.” But misery inspired decision as Hefner thought to him-
self, “I’ve gotta do something.” 34

Within weeks he moved to start his own magazine. He had
toyed with the idea earlier, but now he threw himself into a project
that would express all of his interests, ideas, and passions. Its center-
piece would be the subject that increasingly captured his imagination:
sex. “I just decided to do it all on my own. Nobody else, just do it,” he
said. He knew there was a market for photographs of nude women
from his experience with Publishers Development Corporation,
whose low-quality magazines still appealed. Esquire, he believed, had
deteriorated by removing many of its pinups and cartoons. “I thought
I could really actually put together a good magazine. I felt with abso-
lute certainty that I knew exactly what I was doing.” 35

Hefner began talking up the idea with close friends. He and
Eldon Sellers had taken to playing ping-pong in the basement of his
apartment building, and amid the games Hefner began discussing
his plans for a magazine. “He had it all figured out — and the way
he explained it, I got very excited and wanted to be a part of it,”
Sellers explained. Hefner also contacted Burt Zollo, his accomplice
from Esquire, who was now working for a public relations firm, and
laid out his plan:

I’d like to produce an entertainment magazine for the city-bred
guy — breezy, sophisticated. The girly features would guarantee
the initial sale — but the magazine would have quality, too. . . .
Give the reader reprint stories by big name writers, top art by
local artists, cartoons, humor, maybe some pages in full color
to really give it a classy look. . . . Later, with some money in the
bank, well begin increasing the quality, reducing the girlie fea-
tures, going after advertising, and really making it an Esquire-
type magazine. 36

In the spring of 1953, Hefner took concrete steps to bring his
fantasy to life. He spent his evenings at a card table in the living
room of his South Side apartment, laboring into the early morning
hours as he blocked out the elements of the magazine he decided to
call Stag Party. He formed HMH Publishing Company and enlisted
Eldon Sellers to raise funds. Meanwhile, he contacted distributors

THE TIE THAT BINDS

all over the country, whom he had come to know from his days with
Publishers Development Corporation, and solicited advance orders
for the new magazine. His letter announced “a deal that should make
some money for both of us. stag party — a brand new magazine
for men — will be out this fall.” Every issue of the magazine, he prom-
ised, “will have a beautiful, full page, male-pleasing nude study — in
full, natural color! Now you know what I mean when I say this is going
to be one of the best sellers you’ve ever handled.” 37

Thrilled with his new endeavor, Hefner threw himself into the
work. He sat for long hours at the card table pounding out copy for
the magazine, combing through available articles and cartoons, and
sorting the orders from wholesalers that were arriving steadily. “He
didn’t really sleep much because he was working practically all night,”
Millie reported. Hefner’s enthusiasm became contagious. Burt Zollo,
who had expressed reservations initially, was won over and described
Hefner as “a highly creative guy who was nevertheless highly realistic.
He would be successful.” 38

Much effort went into raising money with family and friends.
A wealthy girlfriend of Sellers’s invested $2,000 [and] Hefner bor-
rowed $200 from a local bank and hocked his furniture with a loan
company for $600 more. Zollo invested $300, while Keith Hefner
contributed $1,000 to his brother’s venture. Grace Hefner, even
though she had reservations about the magazine, invested another
$1,000. A grateful Hugh wrote to his mother, “Because of the spon-
taneity of it and because it was made with the knowledge that much
of the magazine, like my book, will not be material that you fully,
personally approve of, this is just about the nicest thing you have ever
done for me.” Eventually, Hefner gathered just over $8,000 to put out
the first issue of the magazine. 39

Meanwhile, enough orders had come in from distributors for
Hefner to make an arrangement with a printer he knew in New
Bochelle, Illinois. With a new press and some open time, the man
agreed to print Stag Party on credit with half down in thirty days and
the other half in sixty days. Hefner also made an important decision to
hire an art director to handle the visual side of his new magazine. He
contacted a Chicago graphic artist named Art Paul about illustrating
a story, but was so taken by the illustrations on display that he pressed
him to assume a larger role. Hefner had arrived at the artist’s studio
with a growth of beard, wrinkled clothes, and a harried look, but

MR. PLAYBOY

enthusiasm for the new magazine bubbled out of him. “I thought,
for Gods sake, hes either got to be an exceptional person, or he’s got
to be crazy,” Paul recalled. But the artist agreed to work part-time
on the magazine’s visuals, and Hefner paid part of his fee in cash and
part in stock from the new company. 40

Hefner made his most crucial move, however, when he purchased
the rights to a nude photograph of perhaps the hottest, sexiest young
actress in Hollywood. Marilyn Monroe had rocketed to movie star-
dom in 1952 on the basis of the movies The Asphalt Jungle, All About
Eve, and Niagara. In the subsequent flurry of publicity, it came to
light that a Los Angeles photographer had shot several nude photos
of her in 1949 for use in a calendar. Monroe joked that during the
shoot she had “nothing on but the radio.” Hefner read that the John
Baumgarth Calendar Company of Chicago now owned the rights to
one of the photos, but was reluctant to send its calendar through
the mail because of the Post Office taboo on nudity. Knowing that
he needed a gimmick to sell the first issue of his magazine, Hefner
quickly drove to the company. He persuaded John Baumgarth to sell
him the rights to the photos, which featured the actress sitting seduc-
tively against a red velvet backdrop. 41

As the magazine moved nearer to publication, however, an unex-
pected crisis loomed. In September 1953 Hefner received a letter from
a law firm representing Stag magazine. This publication considered
Stag Party to be an infringement on its title and threatened to sue.
Hefner convened a frantic meeting with Millie and Eldon Sellers and
they began tossing around other tides: Top Hat, Bachelor, Gentleman,
Sir, Satyrs, Pan. But none seemed suitable, and Sellers finally offered
Playboy. Millie thought it sounded outdated and made people think of
the 1920s. But Hugh, who associated the Boaring Twenties with “high
living, parties, wine, women, and song — the things we want the maga-
zine to mean,” loved the name and adopted it immediately. A logo had
already been completed by the cartoonist Arv Miller — a stag bedecked
in smoking jacket, standing against a fireplace with a cigarette holder
and martini glass — and it required a quick substitution of a rabbit
head. A bit later, Art Paul would create the famous rabbit head silhou-
ette logo with its “elegant, on-the-town look.” 42

In November 1953, everything was set to launch the first issue of
Playboy. Advance orders for seventy thousand copies had rolled in
over the past several months, but no one knew if the magazine would

THE TIE THAT BINDS

really sell. The first issue rolled off the presses without a publication
date because its youthful editor and publisher, while convinced he
had an attractive product, remained uncertain whether sales would
support a second issue. Hugh Hefner had gambled everything on the
venture, both materially and emotionally, and now he could only wait
and see how it would play out.

PART II

ASCENT

How to Win Friends
and Titillate People

I n the first week of November 1953, a nervous Hugh Hefner walked
I the streets of downtown Chicago, haunting the newsstands for a
I glimpse of his new magazine. The first issue of Playboy had just
appeared, and like an anxious father he fretted about the status of
his offspring. A few weeks earlier Hefner had negotiated a good deal
with a distributor, Empire News, based on advance orders for the
magazine. Then in mid-October he had driven the seventy-five miles
to Rochelle Printing in his beat-up 1941 Chevy, along with Eldon
Sellers and Art Paul, and spent several hours copyreading the page
proofs. When the presses delivered the final product, and it was cov-
ered and bound, Hefner felt a surge of emotion. He described it as
“one of the great moments of my life.” 1

Now Hefner watched as browsers picked up a newsstand copy of
Playboy, curiously looking at the table of contents before sneaking a
peek at the Marilyn Monroe pictorial. He thrilled when a customer

MR. PLAYBOY

bought a copy, and his heart sank when they set it down and moved
on. When the newsstand proprietors were not looking, Hefner even
walked over and moved Playboy to a more prominent position in the
display. Over a period of several days, he brooded that if his magazine
did not sell, the prospect of shattered dreams and bankruptcy loomed
in the near future. 2

Hefner need not have worried. Within a short time, landslide
sales made the new product a winner. Experts had predicted sales
of about 60 percent of copies published, a respectable result. But
Playboy sold nearly 80 percent, about fifty-four thousand copies — an
astounding figure for a new publication that had been launched on
a minuscule budget with little publicity or advertising. The second
issue, which already had been blocked out when the first appeared,
hit the newsstands in early December, and a more confident Hefner
now included his name on the masthead. The second issue outsold
the first by about two thousand copies. 3

Even Hefner seemed a bit taken back by the powerful response to
Playboy. The magazine appeared to strike a nerve almost immediately
as not only readers, but American culture, or at least much of its male
portion, seemed ready for it. The magazine’s appeal radiated from its
very first issue. Daring, provocative, even naughty, but not dangerous
or subversive, Playboy expressed many of the mainstream values of
postwar America while giving them an invigorating new form. Aimed
at men who were trying to navigate the unfamiliar waters of a pros-
perous new social and economic milieu, the magazine offered an
exciting vision of the good life for a society that, without totally being
aware of the fact, was yearning to lead it. Playboy began bringing a
submerged collective social fantasy to the surface.

While proud of his new publication, Hefner knew that it was far
from what he envisioned in terms of quality and style . The first Playboy
was lively and vibrant, crudely composed and not very sophisticated-
looking. The editor joked that its cobbled-together format consisted
of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something
blue.” Behind the rough edges, however, lay all of the basic compo-
nents that the magazine would refine and expand upon in the future.

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND TITILLATE PEOPLE 71

As Art Paul observed, the inaugural issue was “a sketchbook for what
the magazine was really going to be.” 4

A smiling, waving Marilyn Monroe sat on the cover along with a
promise that the reader would find within “For the First Time, in any
Magazine, Full Color,” the famous nude photo of the actress. Readers
then encountered a jaunty introduction that announced a new kind
of magazine for a new kind of male reader:

If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80, playboy is
meant for you. If you like your entertainment served up with
humor, sophistication and spice, PLAYBOY will become a very
special favorite.

We want to make clear from the very start, we aren’t a “family
magazine.” If you’re somebody’s sister, wife, or mother-in-law
and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in
your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion. . . .

Most of today’s “magazines for men” spend all their time
out-of-doors — thrashing through thorny thickets or splashing
about in fast flowing streams. Well be out there too, occasion-
ally, but we don’t mind telling you in advance — we plan on
spending most of our time inside.

We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and
an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the
phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet
discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex. . . .

Affairs of state will be out of our province. We don’t expect
to solve any world problems or prove any great moral truths. If
we are able to give the American male a few extra laughs and
a little diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age, well
feel we’ve justified our existence. 5

There it was in a nutshell — the promise of sophisticated amuse-
ment for young, urban males who sought relief from the stresses and
strains of workaday life, and who felt more comfortable (or, perhaps
more accurately, wanted to feel more comfortable) pursuing modem
art, films, and foreign cuisines rather than wily trout, smoky camp-
fires, and recalcitrant do-it-yourself projects. The magazine would
be, in Hefner’s memorable phrase, “a pleasure-primer styled to the
masculine taste.” 6

MR. PLAYBOY

A quick scan of the first issue’s contents elaborated the nature of
the young Chicagoans magazine. Sexual titillation pervaded. One
article explained how to enliven a boring party with a provocative
game, “strip quiz,” while another depicted nude swimming festivities
in California. A selection from the Decameron provided “a humorous
tale of adultery.” Ribald themes dominated the many cartoons — one
showed a shapely young woman about to write in her diary, asking
a friend, “What is the past tense of virgin?” — as well as “Playboys
Party Jokes.” Other articles explored “The Return of the All-Purpose
Rack,” “The Dorsey Rrothers,” and “Desk Design for the Modern
Office.” “The Mens Shop” displayed the latest in consumer amenities
for young men, while “Matanzas Love Affair” explained the delights
of Cuban food and drink. Reprints of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
and Ambrose Rierce offered mystery and adventure. “Miss Gold-
digger of 1953” denounced greedy women who manipulated the legal
system for alimony.

The centerpiece of Playboy s first issue, however, was its
“Sweetheart of the Month.” As promised on the cover, it showcased
the sensual attractions of Marilyn Monroe. “She’s as famous as Dwight
Eisenhower and Dick Tracy, and she and Dr. Kinsey have monopo-
lized sex this year,” said the text. “She is natural sex personified. It is
there in every look and movement. That’s what makes her the most
natural choice in the world for our very first Playboy Sweetheart
Several photos of Monroe, including a nude shot of her posed against
red velvet, provided proof for the assertion. The magazine assured
readers, “Well be running a beautiful, full color unpinned pin-up in
each new issue of playboy .” 7

What drew men to this potpourri of offerings? The attractive
bundling of sexual images, of course, highlighted by the Monroe
pictorial, initially hooked a male audience whose previous encoun-
ters with erotic material likely consisted of grimy, grainy photos in
underground venues. Rut Playboy ’ s appeal was rooted more deeply
in the broad social and cultural milieu of postwar America.

Middle-class life in the 1950s had emerged from the cauldron of
the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s,
traumatic events that had devastated the economic institutions of the
country in the first case, and dislocated it socially and psychologi-
cally in the second. Memories of bankruptcies and lost mortgages,
of battlefield scars and aching separations, lingered painfully in
the American psyche. Millions of ordinaiy citizens had entered the

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND TITILLATE PEOPLE 73

postwar period yearning to replace uncertainty with security, volatility
with stability, need with possession. The United States’ victorious
position in the world — what pundits increasingly described as “The
American Century” — provided the means to do so.

Coming out of World War II as an economic colossus, the United
States had changed direction from a military to a consumer agenda.
By the 1950s, prosperity had become the hallmark of American
life. Middle-class citizens enjoyed an economy of abundance that
brought an unprecedented flow of goods. Supported by the mortgage
provision of the GI Bill, avast new army of homeowners prompted a
boom in housing construction that produced swelling suburbs such as
Levittown, Long Island, that built and sold seventeen thousand homes
beginning in 1949. The automobile industry boomed as Detroit com-
panies, led by General Motors, produced ever larger, more stylish,
and more powerful cars for average -income buyers. High employ-
ment and steady growth in income encouraged leisure activity with
a resulting boom in vacation travel and television sales. The flood
of consumer products to the middle class led Fortune magazine to
proclaim in 1956, “Never has a whole people spent so much money
on so many things in such an easy way as Americans are doing today.”
The historian David Potter, in a much-discussed book titled People
of Plenty (1954), concluded that material abundance, the key factor
in American development over two centuries, had reached an apex
in the postwar era. In a special 1959 double issue titled “The Good
Life,” Life magazine marveled that in modern America, “suddenly
what used to be the small leisured classes became the big leisured
masses.” 8

The American family emerged at the center of this new consumer
economy. Riding the crest of the ballyhooed “baby boom” of the late
1940s and early 1950s, it achieved newfound prominence in the
postwar period. A new cultural code of family togetherness idealized
life in suburban ranch houses, cruising about in station wagons, and
gathering in family rooms to watch television shows such as Father
Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Americans embraced the prom-
ise of a new kind of family experience that, in the words of one histo-
rian, “would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through
an energized and expressive personal life.” 9

This environment of material abundance and family together-
ness forced a reshaping of the basic American tenet of individualism.
Earlier periods had stressed a rugged personal code where the citizen

MR. PLAYBOY

had marshaled hard work, determination, and self-control to blaze
his own path to success. But in the heady days of the postwar era, a
new socioeconomic atmosphere demanded revisions. An economy
increasingly dominated by large corporations made bureaucracy, not
entrepreneurship, the new field of play. Here a “personality” com-
posed of attractive images and compelling personal skills — not an
old-fashioned “character” of rigid moral values — would foster “team-
work” and ascent up the corporate ladder. New avatars of success,
such as the clergyman- therapist Norman Vincent Peale, in his wildly
popular The Power of Positive Thinking , urged readers to call upon a
“Higher Power” to gain confidence and strengthen mental health as
the basis for securing happiness and prosperity. 10

The pressures of the Cold War molded these elements of abun-
dance, family, and teamwork into a compelling American Way of Life.
Economically, government defense contracts underwrote a significant
portion of 1950s prosperity. Rhetorically, the United States trum-
peted a creed of anticommunism that juxtaposed American bounty
and family, bureaucratic efficiency and vibrant personality against
drab Stalinist collectivism. Pressures for conformity emerging from
corporate bureaucracies, national advertising campaigns, and the
suburban ethos gained additional power from an anticommunist ide-
ology that demanded solidarity against the Red Menace. In 1959,
Life ran a lighthearted story — complete with several photos — about
newlyweds who spent their weeklong honeymoon in a bomb shelter,
surrounded by a cornucopia of consumer amenities. 11

But as the 1950s unfolded, challenges arose to this American Way
of Life that showed widening cracks in its imposing edifice. Much of
it was covert. By mid-decade, Elvis Presley and rock V roll music
were shaking middle-class restraint with depth charges of sexuality
and emotional rebellion. The Beats, through novelists such as Jack
Kerouac and poets such as Allen Ginsberg, bitterly criticized middle-
class materialism and created a bohemian counterculture devoted to
unfettered personal expression. Critics attacked the conformity and
unimaginative quality of bourgeois America in works such as William
H. Whytes The Organization Man (1956), David Riesmans The
Lonely Crowd (1950), and Dwight Macdonalds “A Theory of Mass
Culture” (1957). Macdonalds words typified the critique: “There is
slowly emerging a tepid, flaccid middlebrow culture that threatens
to engulf everything in its spreading ooze.” 12

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND TITILLATE PEOPLE 75

In the heart of the Eisenhower era, it was the genius of Playboy
and its editor to articulate an approach that tapped both mainstream
aspirations and marginal unhappiness. While rebellious, Hefners
magazine did not challenge the basic tenets of postwar American life.
Instead, it channeled the restlessness of ambitious, irreverent, often
accomplished young men toward eliminating its stodgier features and
loosening its most restrictive demands. It expressed a dissent based on
lifestyle. Playboy, and its readers, sought to make hard play the equal
of hard work in the American creed. They sought to remove barriers
to pleasure in order to enjoy the full bounty of the new American
wealth. Through this shared fantasy of self-gratification, they aimed to
enhance the American dream of an abundant life, not overthrow it.

Thus Playboy, while scandalizing old-fashioned defenders of reli-
gion and morality, appealed to growing numbers of people intoxi-
cated with abundance and eager to throw off restraints. Hefner
had a partial awareness of his magazines cultural role. “I wanted to
create a breezy, class entertainment magazine for the city-bred guy,”
he explained in early 1954. At the same time, he believed that his
desires were shared by others. “The whole focus of the magazine was
the notion of living unmarried in a city with your own apartment, with
a nice car, with good food and drink, where you’d actually prepare
something for a romantic dinner. It was all in the first issue.” Indeed,
this cultural agenda for the good life proved to be a bond between
Hefners magazine and its readers. 13

Looking back from a vantage point many years later, Hugh Hefner
saw his magazine standing at the ramparts battling against 1950s
conformity and repression. “Before Playboy, the only moral, proper
way for a middle-class person to live their life was to get married,
settle down, have babies and live happily every after, whatever that
meant,” he explained. “We dared to suggest that there were other
ways of living your life.” He believed that a pernicious alliance of reli-
gion and politics had created a censorious public morality and a rigid
creed of family virtue in the postwar period. He also blamed Red-
hunting McCarthyism for making a mockery of World War II’s demo-
cratic aims and turning anticommunism into a recipe for political

MR. PLAYBOY

and social repression. Playboy, Hefner concluded, struck a blow for
cultural freedom by promoting a freer expression of eroticism. “We
knew that we were obviously ringing some kind of a revolutionary bell
by simply running nude pictures in the magazine,” he noted. 14

But Playboy played a more complex, even ambiguous role, as it
went out to the American public in the mid-1950s. Its dissenting
impulses, while real, were hardly revolutionary. In many ways, per-
haps even more powerfully, it affirmed postwar American values.
Seeking to loosen the system from within rather than assault it from
without, Hefner served as an agent of regeneration for the American
Way of Life. “Playboy is dedicated to the enjoyment of ‘the good life’
that is every American’s heritage, if he’s willing to display a little of
the initiative and derring-do that made the country great in the first
place, instead of settling for job security, conformity, togetherness,
anonymity, and slow death,” he told Cold War America. “And just
incidentally, while trying to climb that ladder of success through cre-
ativity, thought, initiative, and daring to be different, Americans sup-
ply the only chance this country has of moving back into a position of
world leadership.” In various ways, Playboy consistently articulated
a goal of individual success and social prosperity. 15

The magazine urged its readers to enjoy life by embracing leisure,
entertainment, and material comforts. Playboy encouraged people
to partake of exciting new opportunities instead of delaying gratifica-
tion. “Our readers believe in The Good Life, and so do we,” it told
aspiring authors in 1954. “Hence, free-lancers will make us happy by
submitting material that stresses wine, women and song rather than
rod, reel, and bait-bucket.” Editorial asides in the magazine assured
readers that “The Good Life” consisted of “good food and drink,
first-rate reading matter, and a compliable young person of feminine
gender.” 16

Playboy repeatedly connected its vision of pleasure pursuits to
upward mobility in 1950s America. On its first anniversary, it reported
that “the average playboy reader has a little better education, posi-
tion, and income than his non-PLAYBOY-reading brother.” The follow-
ing year, the magazine ran a piece in Advertising Age that quoted a
composite Playboy reader: “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a hard-working
guy and I’m well on my way to the top in business. But I like to have
fun. I like nice clothes, great food and drink, women. No, I’m only
29. I’m college educated, I earn a good living and I expect to earn a

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND TITILLATE PEOPLE 77

good deal more. I have faith in myself and the future. I’m not worried
about tomorrow. I’m living now.” 17

A 1955 survey of Playboy readers uncovered statistical evidence sup-
porting its appeal to the youthful, ambitious, and affluent. Conducted
by the market research company of Gould, Gleiss, and Benn, Inc., it
reported that the great majority of readers were between the ages of
twenty and thirty-four, over 70 percent had attended college, almost
63 percent were business and professional men or students studying
to enter those fields, 88 percent owned automobiles, and nearly all
took regular vacations. Most pursued hobbies such as photography,
reading, or music, smoked a wide variety of tobacco products, and
consumed various brands of hard liquor and beer. Its average reader,
the magazine concluded, was “a young man-about-town who enjoys
good, gracious living.” 18

Playboy’s argument that social success and a hunger for the good
life went hand in hand found its clearest expression, however, in a
1956 ad campaign that asked, “What is a Playboy?”

Is he simply a wastrel, a ne’er-do-well, a fashionable bum? Far
from it: he can be a sharp-minded young business executive, a
worker in the arts, a university professor, an architect or engi-
neer. He can be many things, providing he possesses a certain
point of view. He must see life not as a vale of tears, but as a
happy time; he must take joy in his work, without regarding
it as the end and all of living; he must be an alert man, an
aware man, a man of taste, a man sensitive to pleasure, a man
who — without acquiring the stigma of the voluptuary or the
dilettante — can live life to the hilt.

The Playboy reader, in other words, was someone who was deter-
mined both to find economic success and enjoy its material and
emotional fruits. 19 But Hefner also grasped the more subtle point
that Playboy embodied social fantasy as much as reality. While his
magazine affirmed the appetites of well-connected stock traders,
shrewd young lawyers, and au courant architects, it also provided a
kind of wish fulfillment for weary salesmen or aspiring young middle
managers who desperately wanted to believe they were on the fast
track. As Hefner admitted in a 1955 interview, Playboy, in a sense, was
“an escapist magazine” projecting “the kind of life part of the reader

MR. PLAYBOY

would like to live.” It offered him “an imaginary escape into the world
of wine, women and song,” he said. “Then the other part of him says
he has to go back to his family responsibilities and his work.” 20
Central to Playboy’s fantasy of the good life, of course, was a loos-
ening of traditional restrictions on sexuality. Early issues of the maga-
zine suggested that sex was a healthy, natural human impulse, not a
dirty endeavor to be repressed or a sacred one to be elevated. An array
of erotic photographs, pictorials, cartoons, jokes, and articles drove
home the message. “Nudity and the Foreign Film,” for instance, with
text and photographs, contrasted American and European movies in
terms of depicting nudity. “The movie censors of America have con-
sidered the human body and concluded that it is immoral,” the maga-
zine declared. But no one was justified in “forcing its opinions, tastes,
and attitudes on the rest of us. We make a habit of thumbing our noses
at censors, because we feel they have no place in a democracy.” 21
Hefner defended Playboy’s sexual thrust. “Its one of the things
our guy is interested in, and there’s no reason for us to apologize for
it,” he told an interviewer in 1955. He scorned the notion that his
magazine’s sexuality might corrupt the nation’s youth. The idea that
one must bring “our literature and entertainment down to the level
of twelve-year-olds is incredible,” he argued. Healthy sex was part of
the good life, Hefner insisted, and Playboy’s expression of that senti-
ment “reached the young city man in a way that makes him feel a real
identification with the magazine.” 22

The first issues of Playboy also called for male liberation from the
demands of marriage and family life. Preaching the gospel of bach-
elorhood, the magazine offered articles such as “Miss Gold-digger of
1953,” which warned that greedy women, backed by the courts, were
using divorce settlements to stick an “ex-spouse for a healthy chunk of
his earnings from that day forward, for the rest of his unnatural life.”
When an irate woman sent a letter complaining that most men were
unscrupulous seducers who “ought to pay, and pay, and pay” when
fleeing a marriage, Playboy replied, “Ah, shaddup!” “Open Season on
Bachelors” examined marriage traps laid by women for unsuspecting
men, while “A Vote for Polygamy” came to the breezy conclusion
that “the end of the ignoble experiment in monogamy may be near.”
Hefner and his early readers, resisting the powerful pull of family
ideology of the 1950s, fantasized sex as a form of play released from
its ties to marriage and procreation. 23

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND TITILLATE PEOPLE 79

Beyond sex, Playboy advocated a wide variety of leisure activities
to enhance the good life. Smart, flattering clothing became a must
in articles such as “That Brooks Brothers Look,” which proclaimed,
“Burn my zoot suit, mother. Conservative eastern dress is a must this
season.” Elegant cuisine became another necessity as the magazine
took on a “food and drink editor” in early 1954, Thomas Mario, who
expounded upon the “Pleasures of the Oyster” and explained “the
manly art of outdoor cooking” to aspiring male sophisticates. Sex, of
course, was never far from the flame. In Marios words, when “you
deliver the thick, browned steaks, charred and crisp on the outside,
rare inside” and then hand her an ear of roasted golden bantam com
on the cob you “detect in her eyes a kind of yielding rapture. Are any
further stratagems necessary?” 24

Playboy supplied a steady diet of entertainment. It offered
sketches of celebrities such as Orson Welles, Steve Allen, and Frank
Lloyd Wright, while brief tours of music recordings, films, books,
and sports kept readers conversant with the latest turns in popular
culture. The renowned musician Dave Brubeck explained “The
New Jazz Audience.” “Playboy After Hours” began in 1955 with
reviews of restaurants in Chicago and New York, the new British
musical The Boy Friend, records by Mabel Mercer, Frank Sinatra,
and Billie Holiday, the movies Mister Roberts and Pete Kelley’s
Blues, and books by Harold Bobbins and George Axelrod. The
annual College Issue surveyed the male student with his “dreams of
the future bachelor apartment, the hi-fi set, the well-stocked liquor
cabinet, the sports car — and the bedroom-eyed beauties who will
help him enjoy it all. These are the dreams, of course, that playboy
is made of.” 25

This process of pleasure-priming saw Playboy preparing readers
to face the challenges of upward mobility. Shepherd Mead, in “How to
Succeed in Business Without Beally Trying,” deployed satire to mask
shrewd advice on how to thrive in the corporate world. As he explained,
“It is the ability to Get Along, to Make Decisions, and to Get Contacts
that will drive you ahead. Be an ‘all-around man’ of no special abil-
ity and you will rise to the top.” For the aspiring gourmand, articles
explained a long list of “common menu terms found in restaurants
with a continental background.” Essays such as Evelyn Waugh s “The
Death of Painting” assessed the impact of photography and abstract
expressionism on modern art. 26

MR. PLAYBOY

Playboy’s fictional offerings tried to sharpen readers’ appreciation
of the finer things in life. Top writers responded to generous pay-
ments, and the magazine began publishing short stories by distin-
guished writers such as Ray Bradbury, W. Somerset Maugham,
Charles Beaumont, John Steinbeck, and James Jones. Some offered
gems, such as Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” a chilling futuristic tale,
and Beaumont’s “Black Country,” a gripping story about a jazz horn
player, but others did not hand over their best material. That was fine
with Playboy. Indeed, a solicitation in Writers Digest revealed the
type of writing sought by the magazine. “Fiction should be modem,
aware, sophisticated, highly literate but not literary’; articles should
treat subjects of interest to the city-bred ‘operator’ who knows his way
around, and should be handled in a breezy, comfortable, unpedantic
style; humor should be ribald and/or satirical”; and “Sex, being a part
of The Good Life, will have an important place in all three catego-
ries.” In other words, the cultural curriculum taught at the Playboy
schoolhouse aimed to provide a veneer of sophistication rather than
the real thing. Compiling a cultural Cliffs Notes for those who had
earned gentleman’s C’s in college (or for many others who had only
dreamed of enrolling), the magazine tossed them aesthetic tidbits
that were challenging, but not too challenging. 27

Thus Hefner and Playboy defined the central obstacles facing 1950s
America as matters of lifestyle and taste. He did not stand alone. As
the historian Jackson Lears has pointed out, most highbrow cultural
critics in this period also focused on aesthetics, making their critiques
of American life “a matter of taste” as they excoriated the bland con-
formity and tasteless consumption that had swallowed up the middle
class. 28 But instead of elitist chastisement, Hefner utilized “can-do”
midwestern uplift. Mixing two parts eroticism to one part intellect, and
adding a dash of irreverent humor, he cheerfully concocted a cultural
cocktail that eased ambitious young men into a fuller enjoyment of
American abundance in all of its material and emotional dimensions.

Ill

The attraction of Hugh Hefner’s road map to the good life became
evident in Playboy’s sales. The print run — 70,000 copies for the first
issue — grew steadily and after one year stood at 185,000. It exploded

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND TITILLATE PEOPLE 81

to 500,000 by the end of 1955, and at 1.1 million copies a month
passed Esquire by the end of 1956, with gross sales of some $3.5
million and a net profit before taxes of around $400,000. These quick,
quantum leaps in readership made the magazine an unprecedented
success in American publishing history. 29

Hefner was elated. As he wrote a couple of months after the mag-
azine s first issue:

What do you say when a dream comes true? ... I own a
magazine — a magazine of my very own. . . . Certainly much
of my life, and especially the last three or four years, has been
a preparation for this. For there is nothing on earth I would
rather be doing than editing and publishing this magazine
called playboy. . . . Perhaps I’ll wake up in a few months and
it will all be gone. But in this January of 1954, life is just a little
more wonderful than I ever really believed it could be. 30

But Hefner did not rest on his laurels. Playboy’s initial success
drove the young editor to work at an even more frenzied pace. “Hef s
reaction to the first issue? Going full blast,” recalled Eldon Sellers.
He worked nearly around the clock and barely saw his wife and
daughter. Hefner wrote, “playboy consumes seven days of every
week, more than a dozen hours a day, and I knock off at 1:30 or 2:00
in the morning” 31

His personal identification with Playboy became almost total. “Eve
always edited the magazine for myself, on the assumption that my
tastes are pretty much like those of our readers. The concept of the
magazine should grow and broaden with me,” he informed a local
reporter. The growing profits were gratifying, but his real pleasure
came from editing and publishing the magazine. It was a labor of love
that reflected, in his words, “a yearning to communicate, to express
ones talents and ideas.” Moreover, Hefner began formulating plans
for expansion — opening Playboy to advertising, publishing a compila-
tion book, The Best from Playboy, and licensing specialty items like
calendars and cards. 32

Impressive sales also brought institutional expansion. Hefner
had prepared the first three issues of Playboy on his apartment card
table, but in early 1954 accumulating profits allowed him to rent office
space in a four-story town house at 11 East Superior Street on the

MR. PLAYBOY

Near North Side, directly across from Holy Name Cathedral. Hefner
was delighted with this location in the bohemian section of Chicago
that mingled office buildings, boutiques, antique stores, apartments,
and a teeming nightlife of saloons, strip joints, and clubs. Playboy
began with one floor of offices, but expansion led to the acquisition
of all four floors in little more than a year. 33

The magazine’s profits also rescued the young editor and his family
from debt. Sales from the first couple of issues permitted them to get
their furniture out of hock, and Hefner bought a new Studebaker
for his family on Christmas 1953. In mid-1955, he had the money
to purchase a new Cadillac Eldorado for himself. He and Millie also
prepared to move into a large, comfortable lakeshore apartment.
When dreaming of his own magazine, he wrote, “I didn’t realize that
it would make me rich, but that’s what it’s doing.” 34

Even more importantly, however, Playboy ’ s skyrocketing popu-
larity put the young editor in the public eye. He became a celeb-
rity, first in his hometown, then gradually throughout the rest of the
country. He emerged as a subject of discussion and speculation. “His
angular features usually have a solemn, almost haggard look, though
occasionally they break into a whimsical grin,” described a feature
article in Chicago magazine. “He speaks rapidly and evenly, punctu-
ating a robust dictionary vocabulary with contemporary slang.” Brief
pieces on Hefner and Playboy appeared in Time and Newsweek by
mid- 1956, and the editor appeared as a guest on Mike Wallace’s Night
Beat, a popular New York television show. He became an American
success story in the best Horatio Alger tradition. As he told a reporter,
“From the time I left high school until the magazine succeeded, I was
never a very happy guy. Now it’s something like being in high school
all over again, but on a much greater scale.” 35

Hefner’s newfound success also inspired a surge of controversy.
As Playboy began attracting attention, censorship problems arose.
In October 1954 the magazine applied for a permanent second-class
mailing permit — it had been operating with a temporary one up
to this point — typically issued to periodicals. The U.S. Post Office
delayed, and then denied, the application on the pretext that Playboy,
which had skipped an issue because of production problems, was not
regularly published. Then a reapplication was denied, this time on
the grounds of obscenity. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield
informed Hefner that a revision of the magazine’s contents might

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND TITILLATE PEOPLE 83

gain approval. So HMH Publishing brought a civil action against
Summerfield in federal court in the District of Columbia in
November 1955.

Hefner sought an injunction to keep the Post Office from interfer-
ing with the delivery of his magazine and asked the court to enjoin
the granting of a second-class permit. He challenged the “censorship
powers” claimed by the Post Office and presented a ringing declara-
tion of principle. “We don’t think Postmaster Summerfield has any
business editing magazines. We think he should stick to delivering
the mail,” Hefner proclaimed indignantly. “This isn’t a new fight.
It never is. Yesterday it was Anthony Comstock, today it is Arthur
Summerfield.” Hefner won a complete legal victory. The court issued
an injunction restraining the Post Office from interfering with the
magazine’s distribution and ordered it to grant second-class privileges.
Eventually, the court awarded Playboy $100,000 in compensation. 36

A couple of months later, a ruckus arose when Chicago’s
Northwestern University banned Playboy from its bookstore. It
claimed that protests had come in from English professors, a navy
ROTC officer, a women’s service group, an assistant football coach,
and a fraternity housemother. Upon investigating these “letters of
complaint,” however, the Daily Northwestern, the student news-
paper, discovered that the writers were fictitious. Meanwhile, Hefner
wrote a letter to the university objecting to the ban. Censorship was
particularly disturbing “in a large university dedicated to the prin-
ciples of democracy and freedom of speech and press,” he wrote. “Of
course, these would-be censors may feel that college students aren’t
yet capable of choosing what to read or see or listen to. . . . These
same ‘censors’ might next logically lead a raid on the Northwestern
university library, which undoubtedly includes a great many books
not quite suited to the adolescent mind.” 37

With both controversy and success swirling around Playboy,
Hugh Hefner emerged as a cultural bellwether in postwar America.
Playboy’s agenda of sensual and material enjoyment reflected the
nation’s massive, ongoing shift from a work culture to a leisure cul-
ture. In a climate of unprecedented and widespread abundance, fresh
desires for play were surmounting traditional demands for labor.
Burdened too long by the deprivations of economic depression and
the sacrifices of war, growing numbers of young Americans wanted
to have fun and enjoy the good life. A restless young midwesterner

MR. PLAYBOY

appreciated those desires — indeed, he shared them — and created a
venue for their expression. Over the last half of the 1950s, his maga-
zine would go on to create a full-blown fantasy formula designed to
fulfill them.

Playboy’s rapid success, however, quickly overwhelmed its crude
bureaucratic structure. Within months of the first issue, it became
evident that a single editor and a few assistants, no matter how dedi-
cated, would not suffice. With typical energy, Hefner threw himself
into building a larger operation.

Hedonism, Inc.

A s Playboy took off in its first year of publication, Hugh Hefner
faced a happy problem: he was overwhelmed with work. The
explosion of sales created editorial and production tasks that
Hefner and a few part-time assistants could not handle. The young
editor moved to address that need by hiring several individuals —
editors, artists, photographers, promotions experts, businessmen,
support staff — to flesh out the publication team.

This influx brought a number of forceful, talented people to
Hefners side and made his operation a beehive of creative fer-
ment. Expansion came in two stages. First, in 1954, the nucleus of
the Playboy operation took shape with the arrival of a tiny group
of longtime editorial operatives. Then in 1956 came a second, larger
wave of hiring that included a group of staffers who would reshape
further the basic structure and look of the magazine. Throughout this
growth process, Hefner put his creative stamp on nearly everything
in Playboy. By the late 1950s, the young publisher had created an
organizational structure that became the foundation for the magazine
for decades.

MR. PLAYBOY

The early days of Playboy, like those of any successful new venture,
were marked by a great sense of excitement and anticipation. As
sales of the first few issues of the magazine rose steadily, Hefner
put together the skeleton of a publication staff throughout 1954 and
early 1955. Art Paul came on board as a full-time art director, Ray
Russell became associate editor, and Vince Tajiri took over as head
of the photo department. Joe Paczek assumed the duties of paste-
and-layout man. Marjorie Pitner became an all-purpose reception-
ist, subscription manager, and bookkeeper, while Eldon Sellers took
on the tasks of advertising, circulation, and business manager. Pat
Pappangelis was hired as Hefners secretary, and John Mastro joined
the organization as production manager.

The tiny group was energized by a powerful feeling of creating
something fresh and interesting. Working in the small Superior Street
town house in an atmosphere marked by common purpose and cama-
raderie, they felt a sense of mission. “In those early days, it was really
a team effort. We were all in on the creation of something exciting
and important,” Pitner reported. “We were there because we loved
what we were doing.” 1

With such a small and close-knit staff working in tight quarters at
the brownstone on Superior Street, there was little division of labor.
Recalled Pitner, “In those days, I handled everything from tracking
artwork and editorial material back and forth to the typesetter and
the printer, to depositing checks from subscribers and labeling their
copies for mailing.” She also typed manuscripts for the magazine and
even lent a hand to choosing risque jokes for the “Party Jokes” page,
until Hefner raised an eyebrow at her awful choices and took her
off the job. During Playboy’s first Christmas, the entire group gath-
ered to stuff magazines into envelopes, affix labels, and rush them
out to mailboxes to get to subscribers on time while listening to Frank
Sinatras In the Wee Small Hours album. 2

A sense of closeness marked the office atmosphere. According to
John Mastro, “We were a family together, we all knew what the job
was, we had a common goal, and we all knew that if this thing goes,
it was good for all of us.” When Hefner got his first Cadillac, the
whole staff gathered to congratulate him, while he personally handed
out bonus checks and thanked them for their hard work at the office

HEDONISM, INC.

Christmas party. An early staffer observed, “There was a closeness
there, and I guess a lot of it was just because of the fact that we were
involved in a new adventure .” 3

Amid this warm atmosphere, several individuals emerged to play
particularly important creative roles in shaping different parts of the
magazine. When Art Paul initially joined Playboy, he had worked on
an hourly basis as Hefner shuttled photos and artwork between his
kitchen and Pauls small studio. The artist received only partial pay-
ment. But as the magazine flourished, he agreed to join Playboy as
full-time art director and took part of his back payment in stock. He
quickly began to create the cool, sophisticated, slightly irreverent
graphics that became a hallmark of the magazine . 4

Paul had been born and raised in Chicago and was trained at both
the Art Institute and the Institute of Design. A freelance designer
in his early career, he maintained a strong interest in jazz, classical
music, and films. Upon his joining Playboy, he and Hefner talked
extensively about design, communication, and how to say what you
wanted to say. They collaborated closely on early issues of the maga-
zine, often working frantically with Paul doing layout and Hefner
writing copy right up to press time . 5

The art director, like Hefner, was determined to create a distinc-
tive look for the magazine. In his words, “I really wanted to see if
I couldn’t create a whole new visual kind of language.” He sought a
clean, fresh design style with, in his phrase, “a keen sense of drama.”
Paul had a hand in shaping every visual component of Playboy : choos-
ing artwork and arranging photographs, directing layout and type
styles, consulting on cartoon art and reproductions, and conceptualiz-
ing special features. He played a key role in designing the magazine s
cover, which not only had to convey what the issue was about but also
include the Playboy rabbit symbol (the latter quickly developed into a
game as readers tried to find the often cleverly hidden head-and-ears
logo). But whatever the specific project, Paul always aimed for a
strong relationship between language and graphics. He believed that
visuals must somehow “broaden the scope of the story or get the
reader to exercise curiosity .” 6

While Paul worked with Hefner to shape the distinct graphic
image of Playboy, Ray Russell arrived to help with a host of edito-
rial chores. He also had grown up in Chicago, studying acting at the
Goodman Theatre and music at the Chicago Conservatory of Music

MR. PLAYBOY

before serving a stint in the air force during World War II. He was
working as an editor at the Walgreen Pepper Pod , the house publica-
tion of Walgreen Drug Stores, when he saw the first issue of Playboy
in a local bookstore. Noticing the reprinted articles obviously secured
on the cheap, he sent off a couple of his stories to the magazine
along with a humorous note recommending that it “wise up and start
printing a few stories written later than 1889.” To Russell’s surprise,
he received a phone call a couple of days later from “a young man
obviously pitching his voice very low in an attempt to sound fifty years
old.” They set up a meeting at a bar in January 1954, Russell hoping
to secure a writing assignment or two. Rut Hefner, who arrived car-
rying his usual oversized briefcase full of artwork and layouts, was so
impressed that he offered the writer an editorial position on the spot.
Russell accepted immediately. 7

He joined Hefner and Paul at the Superior Street offices a couple
of weeks later. “The three of us constituted the entire editorial and art
staff of Playboy. There weren’t even any secretaries. Hef and I typed
our own letters,” Russell related. “Hef and Art and I were constantly
in and out of each other’s offices, conferring, very occasionally arguing,
bubbling over with ideas and enthusiasm.” Russell became involved
with every aspect of the magazine dealing with words. He screened
submissions, edited those chosen for publication, wrote photo cap-
tions and subscription pitches, reviewed books and movies, and
“retold” Ribald Classics from Roccaccio and Ralzac. He even wrote
original articles on current personalities such as Frank Lloyd Wright
and Dave Garroway. One of his most enduring contributions was
the subscription pitch titled “What is a Playboy?” that became a key
expression of the magazine’s philosophy for many years. 8

Looking like a miniature Orson Welles with his rotund figure,
beard, cigar, and theatrical personality, Russell threw himself into
the multitude of tasks facing the tiny staff. When boxes of new maga-
zines from the bindery arrived, he helped Hefner lug them up the
stairs and weigh them on a baby scale (it was Hefner’s own, donated
by his mother) before they were sent out to distributors. He emptied
the wastebaskets. He scrambled to meet publication deadlines as
he, Hefner, and Paul often drove to the printing plant in Rochelle
once a month and stayed up all night amid the roar of machinery
correcting proof pages as they rolled off the presses still wet. Rut
Russell loved his work. The early magazine “was crude but vital,

HEDONISM, INC.

full of amateurish blunders but also full of freshness and wide-eyed
enthusiasm,” he noted. 9

Hefners third important hire was Vince Tajiri, who became photo
editor. Of Japanese American background and a native of Southern
California, this self-taught photographer had served during World
War II with the famous 442nd Infantry before moving to Chicago to
shoot weddings and assignments for small magazines. He was employed
at Publisher s Development Corporation when he befriended Hefner.
He declined to invest in Playboy because of the risk, but responded to
Hefner s job offer a couple of years later. “When I arrived, the photo
department was me, one file cabinet, a secretary and two desks,” he
recalled. Tajiri also wondered aloud if there would be enough work to
keep him busy — Hefner never let him forget the remark — but soon
began to focus on creating a distinct photographic style for Playboy.
He described it as “slick but candid, a cross between advertising pho-
tography and photo journalism — not only for the nude layouts but
for fashion, food and drink, all the lifestyle elements that are such an
integral part of the magazine s identity.” 10

Something of a perfectionist, Tajiri took great pains to choose just
the right photos from among the hundreds he took or were submitted
to him. Photographers sometimes went through eight or ten shoots
before Tajiri would accept their work. “We always overshoot our
layouts,” he explained. “For example, we usually shoot about
120 sheets for each Playmate. . . . We only use about one out of every
fifty shots.” Tajiri also proved very sensitive to Hefners aesthetic pref-
erences, especially regarding young women. In his words, the pub-
lisher liked a natural feeling where the girl was “caught in a moment
of her life when she was doing something, or has just done something,
and then looks up at the camera and presumably associates with the
reader.” This approach also carried over into photographs of cloth-
ing and meals, where Tajiri proved adept at conveying “the fun you
could have or enjoy, the tastes of foods, the taste of wines.” His photo-
graphic style became a hallmark of Playboy. “It is rather slick but we
try to bring into it a candid, alive, realistic feeling,” he explained. 11

In 1956, a second stage of staff expansion came as Playboy profits
funded the move to a four-story office building on Ohio Street. As
Hefner wrote to his brother in April, “On the business side, every-
thing I have to report is tremendous. Each month proves incredibly
better than the last and this obviously cannot go on forever, but the

MR. PLAYBOY

end of the growth is not yet in sight.” This continued success of the
magazine allowed for payment of an annual lease of about $500,000
following a complete remodeling of the building at a cost of about
$325,000. It also allowed Hefner to hire several important figures
who would play major roles in taking Playboy to a new level of popu-
larity and influence. 12

His most important move came with the hiring of A. C. Spectorsky.
In July 1956, Playboy announced that this distinguished New York
journalist and literary figure would be joining the magazine as
Hefner’s second-in-command. The publisher had decided that some-
one carrying credentials with the East Coast establishment would
help Playboy to gain increased respectability. Playboy had published
one of Spectorsky s stories, “Some Guys Get It,” under a pseudonym,
and when Hefner decided to hire a literary editor his name surfaced.
The young publisher set about luring Spectorsky to Chicago. After
a phone call established that he might be interested, Hefner flew to
New York to discuss the situation and offered the job. After a trip to
Chicago to check out the Playboy operation, Spectorsky accepted. 13

Arrangements were soon made — a salary of $35,000 a year, an
expense account, stock options, moving expenses, an advance against
salary to escape one apartment lease and sign another. Hefner was
delighted with his new editorial director. Impressed with Spectorsky s
literary credentials and connections to writers, he described the New
Yorker as “a real heavyweight” who would “handle a lot of the issue
by issue problems and free me to plan more of the special features,
handle long-range planning, etc.” Spectorsky appeared equally
pleased with his new job. Convinced that his talents and Hefners
would complement one another perfectly, he told the publisher, “With
your instincts and my taste, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.”
Equally important, he was content to remain in the background and
support Hefner as the public symbol of the magazine. “I think Hef,
the young sparkplug and head of the whole operation, is the guy who
should be kept in the foreground,” he wrote in a staff memo. 14

Auguste Comte Spectorsky did much to bring a more sophisti-
cated, polished air to the upstart Chicago publication. He came from
a cosmopolitan background, having been born in Paris in 1910 to
Russian emigres, and spoke F rench exclusively for the first four years
of his life, before his parents fled to New York City to escape the
onrush of World War I. He graduated from New York University after

HEDONISM, INC.

majoring in physics and mathematics, but a gift for writing led to a
stint on the New Yorkers editorial staff. He then became the literary
editor at the Chicago Sun for six years in the 1940s, before returning
to New York to work as a writer and editor in movies, television, and
journalism. In the early 1950s, he authored a much-discussed book,
The Exurbanites. A tall man with short-cropped hair, large eyes, and
languid manner, Spectorsky had an elegant, world-weary persona that
underlined his urbanity, while his age (he was ten or fifteen years
older than the others on the Playboy staff) contributed further to his
authority. 15

Almost immediately, Spectorsky put the magazine in touch with
the literary culture of the East Coast. Soon after signing on, he and
his wife, Theo, hosted several parties in New York City to introduce
Hefner to important authors, publishers, and agents. “Hef knew no
one, so I took him by the left arm so his right arm was free to shake
hands, and introduced him to every single person,” Theo related.
“I couldn’t just introduce him, then leave him on his own because he
was so shy he’d just shut up.” Moreover, Spectorsky began to exploit
his literary contacts to bulk up the fiction and nonfiction offerings
in Playboy. Ken Purdy, for instance, a personal friend, soon became
a regular contributor, along with an impressive list of fiction writers
such as John Steinbeck, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, P.
G. Wodehouse, and Charles Beaumont. Nonfiction authors such as
Vance Packard, Philip Wylie, Ralph Ginzburg, and Arthur C. Clarke
joined them. 16

Equally important, Spectorsky began to construct a talented and
hardworking staff. Although an imposing figure, he was a pleasant,
considerate man whom nearly everyone grew to love as well as respect.
Ray Russell, for instance, initially resented the New Yorker’s arrival but
soon came “to really like and admire Spec.” Arlene Bouras, who joined
the magazine as a highly skilled copy editor, found him to be an excel-
lent line editor and a wonderful discussant on larger questions of style,
content, and language. Commented an assistant editor, “He’s not only
the most professional editor I’ve ever met, but he also can write. He
dictates most of his prose, right into the machine with hardly a change.”
Spectorsky shouldered many tasks at Playboy — from securing writers
to reading every word that went into the magazine, from integra t ing
the various editorial functions to serving as a liaison between edito-
rial and circulation, from coordinating with graphics and photographs

MR. PLAYBOY

operations to okaying the layouts before they went to Hefner for final
approval. “If there is a man behind the scenes at Playboy” he told an
interviewer several years later, “I suppose I am it .” 17

Publicly, Spectorsky expressed contentment with his position.
“I am a much better writer than when I came to Playboy ” he told
an interviewer about five years after joining the magazine. “It helped
me clarify a lot of my thinking about the relationship of the sexes
and what makes some people happy and others unhappy . . . [and]
loosened up a lot of rather rigid ideas I’d had without realizing I had
them.” He also enjoyed the affluence the job brought him, buying a
big apartment, a sailboat, a yacht club membership, and a big house
in St. Croix.

Privately, however, Spectorsky developed profoundly ambivalent
feelings about working for Playboy. He never got over the idea that
the magazine, somehow, was beneath his talents. The reasons were
complex . 18

In part, Spectorsky viewed his position at the magazine as a sign of
his failed literary career. “He wanted to write something that would
last in history,” recalled his wife. “He wanted to achieve stature —
and he felt that he would never achieve it at Playboy .” Bouras, his
good friend and colleague, agreed. “He aspired to an awful lot more
than he ever achieved in life,” she reported. “And I think he knew he
was capable of original work and he hated himself for never having
achieved it.” Spectorsky aspired to be editor of the New Yorker, and
developed a kind of self-contempt when he failed to do so. He would
tell a story, for instance, about contacting Lionel Trilling, the famous
literary critic, when Hefner offered him a job. Spectorsky was worried
that it would be viewed as selling out, but he reported that Trilling
replied, “You have nothing to sell out.” Spectorsky meant the story to
be self-deprecating, but most listeners found it to be embarrassing,
sad, and all too revealing of the teller . 19

Spectorsky’s ambivalence also appeared in his complicated, love-
hate connection with Hefner. Publicly, and often privately, he praised
his boss for his intelligence and described him as “that rare creature in
this business, a publisher who is primarily editorially-oriented rather
than business oriented.” He believed that Hefner had an unerring
instinct for what was right for his magazine, and a broad streak of gen-
erosity in his personal makeup. At the same time, Spectorsky became
contemptuous of what he saw as Hefner s deficiencies — bad aesthetic

HEDONISM, INC.

taste, an unwillingness to be intellectually challenged, an emotional
distance from friends and colleagues, an intense selfishness, an unpre-
dictability in his work hours and decision-making process. Sometimes
his frustrations boiled over. “You want every article to be the way
you’d handle it if you were writing it. You refuse to accept an article
writers own approach to his subject,” he complained to Hefner in
1957. Playboy’s progress must be judged comprehensively, not by
“you alone-at-night, vaguely terrified, with frustrated feelings about
one article.” Spectorsky began referring to Hefner (behind his back)
as “Godzilla” and emerged from many encounters, according to Ray
Russell, with “an exasperated gaze heavenward or a weary shake of
the head, or a sigh of weltschmerz.” 20

Nonetheless, he yearned for his boss’s approval. “He had a very
strange relationship with Hefner,” Spectorsky’s wife reported.
“Almost father-son, but the wrong way around. I don’t know why he
had this tremendous need to please Hefner but he did.” When the
magazine’s popularity soared and the publisher credited the editorial
staff, Spectorsky was elated. Rut when his teenage daughter died
from a medical complication in the mid-1960s and Hefner was the
only staff member who failed to offer condolences, he grew despon-
dent. “There have been times when I’ve hated Hef more deeply than
anybody I don’t love,” Spectorsky once confessed. “To hate him as
much as I’ve hated him, you really have to love him.” 21

Around the same time that Spectorsky arrived on the scene, another
man joined Playboy who would become one of the most influential,
and controversial, figures in the organization’s history. Victor Lownes
met Hefner at a party hosted for the up-and-coming comedian
Jonathan Winters. The two hit it off immediately and began going
out to clubs and taverns together. Within a few weeks Hefner offered
Lownes a job at his magazine, and the young Chicagoan became head
of promotions. Over the next decade, he also would become promo-
tions director for the Playboy Clubs. 22

Victor A. Lownes III came from a silver-spoon background.
He grew up in Florida as the son of an affluent building contrac-
tor, while his grandparents on both sides of the family were quite
wealthy. “There were chauffeured Pierce Arrows and things like that
in my background,” he once told an interviewer. After attending prep
school in New Mexico, he matriculated at the University of Chicago,
married the daughter of a rich cattle rancher from Arkansas, and took

MR. PLAYBOY

a job with one of his grandfather’s companies. Although ensconced
in a fashionable Chicago suburb with a beautiful home and two small
children, he grew to hate his life. He felt trapped in a tennis-club and
cocktail-party society while his career stalled in a series of dead-end
promotion and advertising jobs. So in 1953 Lownes left his family,
divorced his wife, and moved into a bachelor apartment where he
began to date showgirls and host boisterous parties. It was at one
such gathering that he met Hefner. According to Eldon Sellers, a
friend of both men, Lownes began “romancing” the young publisher
because he was impressed with him and Playboy and wanted to be
a part of it. 23

Lowness charm and sophistication appealed greatly to Hefner. He
was everything Hefner aspired to be — handsome, debonair, witty, and
elegantly attired in Brooks Brothers clothing as he seduced count-
less women who crossed his path. “Hef emulated Victor — he really
wanted to be Victor,” Theo Spectorsky observed. Playboy staffers
commented that “when Vic talks, Hef sees it in technicolor.” The two
developed a real camaraderie, eating at the East Inn and spending
late-night hours at clubs on Rush Street such as the Cloister Inn, the
Black Orchid, and Dante’s Inferno. 24

Lowness oversized personality and outrageous sense of humor
quickly made him a legend at Playboy. While working late at the
magazine, he discovered that a local radio show called The Bishops
Study — a Catholic clergyman would advise callers on personal
problems — had a telephone number one digit off from that of his
office phone. So frequently he received the radio shows calls by mis-
take. Claiming to be the bishops assistant, Lownes dispensed scan-
dalous advice, urging women to leave their families or counseling
young people to live together before marriage. One evening when
a caller asked where the bishop was, Lownes replied, “He’s out get-
ting drunk.” After mounting complaints, the church program finally
changed its number. Another time, Lownes successfully convinced a
beautiful but rather dim young woman that before she bought a dog,
she should contact “Hertz Rent a Puppy” for a test run. The staff
choked back laughter as she earnestly paged through the phone book
looking for the business’s number. 25

Lowness love life seemed a fantasy lifted from the pages of Playboy .
A dedicated womanizer and suave bon vivant, he attracted numer-
ous young women for sexual flings. “Quantity was more important

HEDONISM, INC.

than quality in those days,” he admitted later. Lownes and Eldon
Sellers became roommates and their residence became party cen-
tral. Lownes bolted together four double beds into what he called a
“playpen” and covered it with a huge bedspread, while he and Sellers
made a large bowl of punch with grapefruit juice and grain alcohol.
Female dancers from the nearby Empire Room would drop by after
work, and the group would play strip games into the wee hours of the
morning. Hefner often dropped by to join in the bacchanals. 26

Lownes poured an enormous amount of energy and creativity into
Playboy’s promotions department. He convinced Hefner to set up a
network of college reps to take advantage of the tremendous popular-
ity of the magazine among male students on campuses. Developing a
large staff that soon occupied a whole floor of the Ohio Street offices,
he produced subscription ads, promotional pieces, and items for
newspaper and magazine columns. He became famous as a fountain
of new ideas at staff meetings. “He worked like a shotgun,” noted
one associate. “He’d fire off twelve different ways to do something,
and one of them would hit.” One of his greatest achievements came
with Hefner’s pet projects, the 1959 “Playboy Jazz Festival.” At his
boss’s request, he organized and produced the entire affair — a three-
day music concert that brought such luminaries as Count Basie, Ella
Fitzgerald, and Stan Kenton to some twenty thousand jazz fans at
Chicago Stadium. 27

At the same time, Lowness freewheeling style and flamboy-
ant personality caused problems. Unable to delegate authority and
tremendously egotistical, he intimidated subordinates and spread
confusion. “I had been so successful with so many ideas that I guess
I began to feel that they must all be good, and people should accept
them unquestionably,” he confessed later. “And when they didn’t I’d
try to browbeat them into it.” When the promotions department
became mired in dissension or confusion, Hefner scolded Lownes
for sacrificing competence to creativity. “You’ve got to give me more
than devotion and more than creative genius,” he wrote. “I also need
organization and efficiency, a meeting of deadlines, a following of
procedures.” 28

Moreover, Lownes indulged dark impulses in his personality.
Displaying a cruel streak that alienated even his admirers, he often
turned dictatorial. A master of the putdown, he zeroed in on people’s
personal weaknesses and tormented them with sarcastic jibes.

MR. PLAYBOY

“He was just an abrasive man with everybody,” Theo Spectorsky
said. “He mistreated everybody, ranted and raved, screamed at
people.” Colleagues described him as “brutal,” “vicious,” and a “rat.”
Part of this arrogant behavior stemmed from his background as a
spoiled rich kid, but another part was rooted in tragedy. As a boy,
Lownes had shot and killed a young friend in a hunting accident.
A Playboy colleague believed that he treated people so badly because,
subconsciously, he wanted them to hate him because of that terrible
mishap. 29

Lownes s abrasive behavior caused severe problems in the promo-
tions department. Displaying the classic sign of the bully by picking
on the weak, he “ruled by outright terror” over subordinates, accord-
ing to one colleague. Instead of politely approving or disapproving
proposals from subordinates, for example, he pounded a reply on
their memos with a special rubber stamp, one of which had, Roman
style, a closed fist with the thumb pointed up and the other with it
pointing down. On occasion his rudeness would cause his entire staff
to “quit en masse — the whole floor — and just walk out the door. Hef
would run out to calm everyone down.” Once, when his maltreatment
of employees caused a momentary pang of guilt, Lownes put a jar of
quarters on his desk and told everyone to take a coin whenever he
said something nasty to them. The jar was soon empty. 30

Lowness impulse to belittle and dominate others found a par-
ticularly unpleasant outlet in his treatment of women, producing
boorish behavior and social agitation. He enjoyed sexual conquest,
discarded women at his pleasure, and expected girlfriends to obey
his every whim. According to one, “You wore what he said. And you
did just what he said.” Once, he concocted a late-night plan to have
Hefner go to his apartment, crawl in bed with his sleeping girlfriend,
and pretend to be Lownes as he made love to her. Things backfired,
however, when the drowsy young woman excused herself to use the
bathroom and instead called the police to report a “weirdo” who had
broken into the residence. Officers arrived soon, and a highly embar-
rassed Hefner had to explain his way out of this predicament. When
friends, in recognition of Lownes s bad treatment of women, presented
him with the Golden Prick Award at a party, he began a mock accep-
tance speech: “I would like to thank the members of the academy ...”
Despite such outrageous, egocentric behavior, he became one of the
brightest stars in the Playboy organization by the late 1950s. 31

HEDONISM, INC.

Other influential figures joined the magazine around the same
time. Jack Kessie stepped in as associate editor in 1956, helping to
establish the magazine’s signature style under the pseudonym of
“Blake Rutherford,” author of numerous mens fashion pieces over
the next decade. He personified the Playboy vision of the good life.
Always tastefully attired, he “had the bachelor pad, the hi-fi and the
wet bar, dined at all the elegant restaurants, drank the right wines,
drove the right sports car,” in the words of a colleague. Around the
office, his frequent lunches with Ray Russell — the two would trade
witticisms, barbs, and bons mots as they liberally lubricated their food
with martinis — became much-discussed social events. 32

Anson “Smoky” Mount, a friendly, pipe-smoking Tennessean,
became the magazine’s expert on college football. He supervised the
college bureau, created the famous “Pigskin Preview” each fall, and
began selecting Playboy’s All-American players. From a deeply reli-
gious background, he also emerged as the magazine’s spokesman and
toured the country giving talks and debating fundamentalist critics
of Hefner’s philosophy. Like Kessie, he identified totally with the
Playboy lifestyle, wearing rabbit-ear cuff links and pins and talking
up the magazine to anyone who listened. 33

Artist LeRoy Neiman joined the staff. An old acquaintance of
Hefner’s from his Carson Pirie Scott days, he had studied at the
Chicago Art Institute, painted murals in the army, and eventually
moved into fashion illustration. In 1954 he illustrated his first story
for Playboy, a Charles Beaumont tale titled “Black Country,” and
over the next year he contributed sketches for other stories and did a
cover. By 1956, Neiman’s paintings and sketches had become recur-
ring features in the magazine. A couple of years later, he made his
enduring mark on Playboy with “Man at His Leisure,” a series cover-
ing the most glamorous, exclusive social and sporting scenes in the
world. Neiman’s stylish illustrations of grand hotel suites in London
and Venice, Maxim’s restaurant in Paris, the Cannes Film Festival,
the Grand National Steeplechase in England, the Grand Prix in
Monaco, and bullfights in Madrid became identifiable symbols of the
Playboy lifestyle. In later years he would create the magazine’s famous
“Femlin,” the illustrated long-haired pixie female wearing only long
black gloves and black stockings. His artistic style — impressionistic
with elegant, elongated figures and bold, slashing colors and an aura
of sophisticated elegance — was well suited to the young magazine.

MR. PLAYBOY

Neiman’s personal appearance as a fashionable street tough with a
brusque, profane manner, an ever-present cigar, and a shock of black
hair and extravagantly large mustache made an equally strong impact
in the magazine s offices. 34

With the expansion of the Playboy staff, the atmosphere at the
magazine gradually changed. The close-knit ambiance became more
corporate and turf battles began to emerge. According to one insider,
Spectorsky, Paul, Lownes, andTajiri “spent more time infighting and
backbiting and jockeying for position than they did working together
for the good of the magazine.” But the feeling of excitement survived;
a sense, in Hefners phrase, of “riding a rocket.” In this freewheel-
ing social atmosphere inhabited by young, vibrant, talented men and
women, the air became thick with eroticism. “There was a lot of sex-
ual high jinks at Playboy in the 1950s,” Hefner recalled later. “Sex in
the office was commonplace.” 35

Thus, by the mid-1950s, Hefner had begun building an organiza-
tion but remained clearly atop it. Absolutely devoted to Playboy, he
imprinted his personality and tastes on every aspect of the publica-
tion. He combined boyish enthusiasm with a ferocious work ethic to
lead, and occasionally herd, a talented and strong group of subordi-
nates in the direction he envisioned. He had hired people, in his own
words, “who could do something you wanted even better than you
could do it yourself.” As the creative force driving the magazine, his
life and his work became indistinguishable. 36

F rom the very beginning, when Playboy sold out its first few issues
and scrambled to its feet financially, Hugh Hefner immersed himself
in the publication of the magazine. When he and his tiny staff moved
into the house on Superior Avenue in early 1954, he ensconced him-
self in his fourth-floor office. With a small bedroom and kitchenette
appended to the office, he frequently slept there and his family saw
him less and less. Quite literally, he lived his work.

Hefner followed a work schedule that awed his subordinates.
Marshalling incredible amounts of energy, intensity, and enthusiasm,
he threw himself into publishing Playboy. A staffer described him as
“monomaniacal” and noted, “Women may have been his pastime, but

HEDONISM, INC.

Playboy was his life.” Essentially, he lived at Superior Street, running
out for bites to eat, catching a few hours of sleep in his office bedroom,
and then beginning again. “He’s a very intense, dedicated individual,”
observed Vince Tajiri. “He goes along with maybe a 1000 rpm’s while
most of us are going at 400 and there’s this intensity, and also this
impatience.” He became famous among the secretaries for forgetting
names, dates, and various peripheral matters because, in the words of
one, “his mind was too full of things he was working on.” 37

With the move to the Ohio Street offices, Hefner’s work schedule
maintained its exhausting pace while becoming more eccentric.
His new office suite also had a small bedroom, as well as bathroom
and dressing room, and he would work deep into the early morn-
ing hours, catch some sleep, and begin his workday sometime after
noon the following day. “Every afternoon, he would come barreling
out of his office as if shot from a cannon, and all hell would break
loose,” Arlene Bouras described. “He would ricochet from office
to office issuing orders, finding out why yesterday’s orders hadn’t
been carried out, always demanding more than he was getting from
everyone who worked with him.” As the start of his workday began
moving toward midafternoon, production manager John Mastro kid-
ded, “Hef, I haven’t figured out if you’re a day ahead of us or a day
behind us.” Several celebrated habits began to emerge. First, Hefner
took to working in his pajamas as the boundary between personal life
and job dissolved. Second, he began to fill his office — floor, desk,
tables — with stacks of material. “His own office is a huge, cluttered
room awash with copies of magazines, books, cartoon roughs, proofs,
records, and prints of past and future Playmates,” noted a newspaper
story. According to the cartoonist Shel Silverstein, visitors “really did
have to step carefully to get over and around everything.” 38

Hefner also grew more jaded. In Playboy’s early days at Superior
Street, for instance, the jazz musician Stan Kenton, one of the publish-
er’s idols, stopped by to thank the magazine for honoring him in its first
jazz poll. When Hefner heard, according to LeRoy Neiman, he charged
down the stairs to meet his hero because “that’s the kind of gee-whiz
guy he was in those days.” Only two years later, however, after the move
to Ohio Street, Kenton dropped by to be photographed when Hefner
strolled through the studio looking at some papers and drinking a Pepsi.
He glanced over and saw Kenton “sitting there on a stool under the
floodlights, and he says, ‘Oh, hi, Stan,’ and wanders out again.” 39

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MR. PLAYBOY

But all of Hefners personal quirks faded before his perfectionism,
which drove him to involvement in every facet of Playboy. He
expected everyone to share his passion for the magazine and created
daunting standards of achievement. “He asked more of us than we
were capable of giving, and that brought out the best in us,” Bouras
explained. When Mastro once complained that a production revision
would be too expensive, he replied, “John, you worry about getting it
right; let me worry about the cost .” 40

Hefners exacting standards, however, did not prevent him from
being a generous boss during Playboy’s early years. He took time
to talk with employees such as Marge Pitner and Pat Pappangelis
about personal difficulties and in one case advanced an employee
a large sum of money to pay for several months of treatment for an
emotional problem. While a workaholic, he was no slave driver to his
staff. “Hef, I just can’t work any harder,” John Mastro once told him.
“I know it, John,” Hefner answered. He had a special ability to convey
enthusiasm and inspire subordinates to give their all. His “power of
persuasion,” Eldon Sellers commented, “almost got you into a hyp-
notic state.” A sly sense of humor often lightened the mood. Hefner
once quipped to the dignified Spectorsky, “Eve figured out why you
and your wife are so sophisticated. You practice fidelity for kicks.”
Spectorsky observed that his boss was “able to detect the limitations
and drawbacks of a person as well as his virtues and advantages,”
chew him out if necessary, “then re-inspire him and make him feel
good and loved about his work .” 41

At the same time, Hefner could become distant and impatient.
While forbearing with lesser staffers, he would grow testy with lieu-
tenants, snapping, “Come on. Get to the point.” The publishers
intense focus and high expectations also made him reluctant, perhaps
unable, to compliment members of the Playboy staff. Art Paul, for
instance, observed Hefner struggling to commend editors, artists,
photographers, and production people, noting, “You can almost see
him working on it.” Hefner simply expected others to share his single-
minded devotion to, and high standards for, the magazine . 42

Yet his leadership style allowed input from talented subordi-
nates when it served the larger purposes of improving the maga-
zine. When Hefner disagreed with Art Paul over graphics issues,
he usually backed down, saying, “You’re the art director.” He also
swallowed his own judgment and allowed Ray Russell to push ahead

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101

with “The Contaminators,” a 1959 nonfiction article dealing with
the dangers of radioactive pollution. Hefner feared that such an
article would be too controversial and weighty for an entertainment
magazine, but when the piece elicited much praise, he was delighted
to have been proven wrong. As Hefner described later, he tried to
direct his organization by “more leading than pushing — getting
people to where I wanted them to be — whether it was a cartoonist
or an art director.” 43

As Playboy grew in the mid-1950s, Hefner increasingly focused
on a central task — shaping the magazine’s point of view. He sought to
have all features revolve around a central theme of enjoying the plea-
sures of the good life, and to do so with a consistent tone of irreverent
sophistication. In a 1956 memo to the staff, he outlined this goal:

I don’t want anything in Playboy that runs counter to the basic
editorial attitude of the magazine. . . . [We want] not only
features within the magazine that are in themselves entertain-
ing, but also service features on such things as food, drink,
fashion, and travel that help make life entertaining. ... In our
critical columns, where more than anywhere else we give some
definition to our point of view, we offer opinions on music, clas-
sical as well as popular and jazz, on books and plays and theatre
and films, and we often try to say rather important things about
all this (although we hope to say it entertainingly). . . . Our non-
fiction can sometimes have something to say just a bit deeper
than it is fun to pinch girls in crowds and still not run counter
to the fundamental policy of the magazine. ... I don’t want
articles that preach, or are pompous, or primarily concerned
with international affairs, religion, or racial friction. 44

Hefner directed his energies into molding every element in Playboy
around its “basic editorial attitude.” According to Vince Tajiri, he scru-
tinized every photograph that went into the magazine with “the perfec-
tionism of a diamond cutter” to make sure it fit the house style. Arlene
Bouras received voluminous memos on appropriate type style, copy-
editing, punctuation, and proofreading that became the basis of the
magazine stylebook. His insistence that bullets rather than white
space be used to separate sections in a manuscript became gospel.
“If Jesus Christ himself ever came down and asked for white space,

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MR. PLAYBOY

we wouldn’t give it to him,” he declared. Hefner directed that ads
for tawdry products, no matter how profitable, would not be allowed:
“We won’t accept anything as an advertisement with sex as its primary
appeal .” 45

Hefner’s attention to detail penetrated every nook and cranny of
the operation. He monitored articles on men’s clothing to make sure
they represented “the new and unusual in fashion.” He scrutinized
photographs for their sophistication, declaring, “I don’t want Playboy
to simply follow fashion — I want it to create trends, to point direc-
tions.” Hefner critiqued drafts of movie reviews for excessive artiness.
“Because Playboy is not edited for the select, super-brow. ... I think
we should be trying a little harder to fit our reviews to the editorial
point of view of the magazine,” he instructed. “Instead, we’re getting
a lecture on cinematic art.” He demanded a more sympathetic article
on Charlie Chaplin, one that reflected Playboy’s recognition that “the
dreamer and idealist [was someone] who may not always conform,
who may not always be right . . . who may do things of great artistic
brilliance followed by things of uneven or even inept quality, for such
is the nature of genius .” 46

Music lay especially close to Hefner’s heart and drew special
attention. He hired the distinguished jazz writer and critic Leonard
Feather, and solicited a series of pieces on the history of jazz. He
requested articles “that will explain the differences in the kinds of
jazz, how they developed and something about the men and circum-
stances responsible for them.” When the soundtrack for the movie
High Society was released, he asked for a review combining senti-
mentality (a Hefner trademark) with the usual hip commentary. The
record had “kept me in a warm, romantic glow all evening,” he told
Spectorsky. “Let’s mix a little sweetness with the sulphuric acid you
guys are brewing. . . . The songs are all originals by Cole Porter, there
are some real beauties here.” He also mandated increased attention
to television as a growing form of entertainment . 47

Always, of course, Hefner relentlessly promoted Playboy to
the public. In a long letter to old friend Burt Zollo, whose company
was publicizing the magazine, he complained about a lack of results.
He insisted that the magazine should be easy to promote. “A bunch
of Chicago guys have put together the craziest publishing success in a
decade and not a single Chicago newspaper has done a feature story
on it,” he groused. “The special services that we might expect from

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103

a public relations organization with many contacts and much know-
how just aren’t coming off.” Wi t hin a short time, Hefner signed on
with a new public relations firm. 48

Ultimately, however, the key to Hefner’s approach was that he
edited Playboy for himself, aiming it at his own tastes and values.
“Hefner used to tell us that he had the book done for his satisfac-
tion and that if he liked it others would, too,” Jack Kessie reported.
Said Victor Lownes, “It was a guidebook for him, just as it was for
millions of young college men.” Spectorsky concurred: “The reason
he’s so good at his job is he’s schizophrenic enough to be editor and
publisher and, at the same time, audience.” Hefner usually asked for
opinions and input, but in the final analysis he always went with his
own sense of what was appealing. When asked about this, he replied
simply, “It’s a very personal book and a very personal business.” Later,
he explained in more depth. “I was doing the magazine for myself,
but it was . . . my perception of a young urban guy in a connection
with the opposite sex. I created a kind of romanticized, idealized
young urban bachelor and aimed the magazine at this figure.” 49

In 1956, an evaluation revealed just how well suited he was to his
job when Hefner hired a firm to administer psychological audits to all
executives at the magazine, including himself. The report described
him as “well qualified for your present position as Editor- Publisher
of Playboy magazine” and affirmed his great mental ability, a broad
streak of creativity, tremendous drive, and zest for his work. But the
evaluators also noted several dangers in Hefner’s makeup: a weaker
sense of planning and administration, an element of impulsivity and
immaturity in formulating actions, a habit of working to the point of
physical exhaustion, and an inability to delegate authority that por-
tended trouble when the organization grew larger. Overall, however,
the audit concluded that Hefner would thrive when administering
“creative programs. This direction should be satisfying to your high
needs for self-expression.” 50

Clearly, Hefner was doing something right. One of the great
success stories in American publishing, Playboy surged upward in
1956 from eightieth place to become the forty-ninth largest-selling
magazine in the country, passing Esquire in the process and posting
a 102 percent gain, the largest in the industry. It had net sales of
just over $3 million. By the end of 1959 its circulation had climbed
to over one million copies a month while total revenue swelled to

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$5.5 million. The magazine’s growing size and complexity reflected its
popularity. While the January 1957 issue was eighty pages long with
nineteen features and articles, the December 1960 issue was almost
double that size, with 150 pages and twenty-eight features. 51

As the magazine grew, so did Hefners confidence. When he
offhandedly expressed an interest in making foreign movies, a lieu-
tenant replied, “The only trouble with that, Hef, is that you’ll have
to be in a foreign country.” The publisher replied, “Okay, in that case
well start our own.” But Hefner also clearly appreciated his success.
In December 1958, on Playboy’s fifth anniversary, he expressed his
gratitude:

When I sit at my desk here in the playboy building, looking
back to that day in the fall of 1953 when all this began, it all
seems quite unreal. When I put together that first thin issue
of playboy ... I hoped only that the magazine might be
successful enough to permit me to continue working at what
I loved instead of wasting a life away at something else that I
didn’t really care about. But this labor of love has turned into
the most spectacular magazine success of our generation, has
brought me in five years more recognition and wealth and
purpose than I ever dreamed of having in an entire lifetime.

I am — I think — one of the luckiest men in all the world. 52

But what had fueled the skyrocketing popularity of Playboy?
Hefner believed that people sensed “right away, very early, it wasn’t
just a magazine. It was a projection of people’s fantasy life.” Yet what
was the content of this fantasy? What exactly were people respond-
ing to in Playboy’s imaginative vision? In fact, Hefner’s magazine
captured perfectly two powerful trends in postwar American culture:
sexual liberation and consumer abundance. From these elements
Playboy created an enticing dream world of physical and material
pleasure for a society grown increasingly impatient with restraint. 53

The Pursuit of
Happiness

I n the fall of 1956, Hugh Hefner appeared on The Mike Wallace
Interview , a popular television show in New York City. The host,
who would become famous in a few years as a national reporter for
CBS, was already building a reputation as a tough interviewer. He
confronted his guest immediately. “Tonight our guest is the thirty-
year-old brain behind the hottest property in the publishing world,”
Wallace began. “And well try to find out why he really did start
Playboy and whether or not it is just a smutty book.” Noting that
the magazine presented pictures of girls in various states of undress,
he asked Hefner if he enjoyed the profits from this “oversexed”
endeavor.

Hefner defended himself. Sex, he admitted, was an important
component in Playboy because it was important to his audience of
young, urban males. But he noted that the magazine also included
much material on clothing, music, automobiles, and food and drink as
well as literature by distinguished authors. When Wallace suggested

105

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MR. PLAYBOY

that what he was really selling was “a high-class dirty book,” Hefner
replied, “There’s nothing dirty in sex unless we make it dirty. A picture
of a beautiful woman is something that a fellow of any age ought to
be able to enjoy,” he maintained. “It is the sick mind that finds some-
thing loathsome and obscene in sex.” But Wallace refused to relent,
and the publisher finally grew annoyed. “I would estimate that no
more than 5% of any issue of playboy is concerned with sex, and
we seem to be devoting an entire half-hour program to it tonight,”
he snapped at one point. 1

This rhetorical exchange reflected the first stirrings of what came
to be called the “sexual revolution.” As middle-class America enjoyed
a great wave of prosperity in the 1950s and older habits of self-denial
withered, a new commitment to pleasure penetrated into the most
intimate, personal realm of human life: sex. Increasingly, many ben-
eficiaries of the culture of abundance challenged older ideas about
proper sexual values that had been in place since the nineteenth
century. This movement emerged as a coalition of those pursuing a
sexualization of culture, those advocating a reconfiguration of family
life and gender roles, those deploying sex as a political tool to assault
bourgeois life, and those seeking greater tolerance for diverse sex-
ual practices. These groups found a common enemy in traditions of
sexual restraint supported by church, state, and middle-class values.
As pressure mounted from dissenters and agitators, cracks appeared
in the edifice of sexual propriety that dominated American culture in
terms of music, movies, popular literature, and dating etiquette. 2

Playboy , with its erotic photographs and dissenting editorial
stance, offered one of the earliest open displays of rebellion. Arbiters
of mainstream culture took note. In 1957, a playful cartoon in
the New Yorker featured a drawing of a sultan surrounded by dozens
of beautiful harem girls as he sat reading a copy of Playboy. That same
year, a long article in the Nation examined the growth of sophistica-
tion in America by examining magazines such as Vanity Fair ; Esquire,
Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. It also noted a new arrival. “The recent
phenomenon of the sophistication business is Playboy,” it explained.
“Starting bawdily and naively, it has grown progressively subtler”
with its photographs of fresh, attractive young women from ordinary
avenues of American life. “I must applaud a brand-new invention in
eroticism which grew out of the free-wheeling, ebullient attitude of
the editors,” noted the author. 3

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

107

While the sexual revolution would not arrive full-blown until the
middle of the next decade, the 1950s saw initial rumblings. Perhaps
more than any other single individual, Hefner represented the first
stage of rebellion as Playboy expressed a growing, if inchoate, yearn-
ing for a new sexual code.

In later years, Hefner often asserted that a desire to overthrow
prevailing American attitudes about sex in the 1950s had prompted
him to start Playboy. The culprit creating this prudish, hypocritical
climate, he believed, was Americas Puritan past. He himself had been
taught as a youngster that sexuality reflected humans’ animal instincts
and, as such, was something to be distrusted and repressed. “I began
questioning a lot of that religious foolishness about man’s spirit and
body being in conflict, with God concerned primarily with the spirit of
man and the Devil dwelling in the flesh,” he wrote. “I wanted to edit a
magazine free of guilt about sex.” Playboy, with this agenda, provided
a voice for those beginning to search for a new sexual morality. 4

While Hefner’s appraisal of Playboy’s liberationist role contained
much truth, he misidentified the enemy. The publisher followed the
lead of H. L. Mencken, the literary and social critic, who had launched
hilarious, mocking attacks on the abiding heritage of Puritanism
in the 1910s and 1920s. But the cultural opposition actually came
from a different source. The sexual atmosphere that Hefner found
to be so suffocating, in fact, was the legacy of nineteenth-century
Victorian ideology rather than the Puritan theology of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. The belief that desires required
self-denial and bodily appetites demanded self-control, while rooted
in centuries-old Christian principles, had emerged wholesale from
Victorian moralists in the nineteenth century, whose worldview had
been shaped in the nexus of a rapidly expanding market capitalism
and a vibrant evangelical Protestantism. Victorians insisted that pas-
sions, if unrestrained, would undermine the capacity for hard work,
a virtuous private life, and a benevolent public one. Sexuality, of
course, stood high on their list of sensual delights to be repressed.
Popular advice writers like Sylvester Graham instructed young men
and women that sexual indulgence led to moral decline, physical

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MR. PLAYBOY

dissipation, and social disaster. By the late nineteenth century,
sexual orthodoxy had produced a host of anti-vice statutes, such as
the Comstock Act (1873), which banned obscene materials from the
mail. Anthony Comstock, an intrepid foe of erotic materials as well
as contraceptives and abortifacients, was appointed a special agent
of the U.S. Post Office and spent the next three decades removing
sexual materials from avenues of public exchange, including stores
and shops. He became the ultimate symbol of Victorian rectitude on
sexual matters. 5

Victorian ideology, however, was tottering by the early decades
of the twentieth century. Advocates of an emerging consumer econ-
omy encouraged the embrace of leisure, pleasure, and play and the
abandonment of self-denial. A new ethos of self-fulfillment inspired
advertising messages promising personal happiness through the pur-
chase of goods; new amusement parks such as Coney Island showcased
the delights of recreation; and new advice literature, such as Dale
Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, stressed the
necessity of sparkling personality instead of upright character. Yet
Victorianism, while desiccated in many areas, maintained a powerful
hold on sexual culture well into the middle decades of the twentieth
century. Ensconced in small-town America and bolstered in urban
areas by Catholic and Protestant churches, sexual orthodoxy actu-
ally received a new boost after World War II from a popular credo
of “family togetherness” that made domestic harmony a hallmark of
American life, and defined it as a key source of strength in the larger
Cold War struggle against communism. 6

Thus Hefner, indeed, faced a powerful, long-standing opposi-
tion in the Eisenhower era. In sexual matters, Victorian restraint and
repression still loomed large in American culture. As one historian has
put it, middle-class respectability “provided a clear set of rules about
sexual behavior. At its heart was a simple stricture: no sex outside mar-
riage.” Propriety made dating into a complex series of stages (going
steady, pinned, engaged), with an attendant hierarchy of carefully
negotiated physical intimacies (necking, petting above the waist, below
the waist, through clothes, under clothes). Parents and schools limited
opportunities for young people to have sexual contact by imposing
curfews, controlling use of the car, and encouraging double dating. 7

Yet scattered challenges to the sexual orthodoxy sprang up in the
1950s. The Kinsey Reports, with their analysis of male and female

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

109

sexual practices, created a storm of controversy by revealing the extent
to which actual conduct violated official values . Much popular reading
material — Grace Metalious s salacious best-seller Peyton Place, tell-
all scandal magazines such as Confidential, Mickey Spillane mysteries
pulsating with violence-tinged eroticism — broached parameters of
sexual propriety. Rock V roll, unforgettably symbolized by Elvis
Presley and his gyrating hips, blared rhythmic sensuality and sug-
gestive lyrics to dancing teenagers. Gradually, a powerful assault on
traditional notions of sexual restraint began gathering momentum. 8

Hefner and Playboy particularly popularized an ideology of sex-
ual liberation in the 1950s that began to erode traditional values.
A Thomas Paine for the mid-twentieth century who distilled complex
ideas into bright prose and vivid images, Hefner entered public life as
the pamphleteer of the sexual revolution. He stressed several themes
in his rhetorical and visual assault on the palisades of propriety.

Hefner propagated the deceptively simple idea that sex should be
fun. Throughout the first decade of Playboy’s publication, he attacked
the traditional formulation that sex must be either sacred or sinful
and rejected the cultural dictum that it should be strictly relegated
to the realm of marriage. In the modern world, he argued, sex could
no longer be linked exclusively to procreation and the sanction of
church and state. It existed for a variety of purposes. In his words, “it
could be recreational, a sense of identity in terms of who you are, an
expression of love.” Hefner sought to make the erotic legitimate on
its own terms. 9

Throughout the 1950s, Playboy promoted the notion that sex was
for human pleasure. As Hefner once quipped, “We believe sex should
be enjoyed right along with nasty pleasures like drinking and gam-
bling.” A host of articles, stories, and images followed his editorial
lead. “Don’t Hate Yourself in the Morning” reassured virile readers
that young women also sought erotic experiences outside marriage.
“Many women are beginning to adopt the sexual attitude of bach-
elors, in that they want physical pleasure — or relief, if you prefer —
without having to pay for it by signing up for a lifetime.” “Contour
Contact: The Gentle Art of Laying Hands on Lasses All About You”
instructed young men in techniques of delicately stroking the arm
of a young woman, helping her into or out of a taxi, or leaning over
to smell the perfume she had dabbed behind her ear. Such subtle
physical contact provided a “sadly undervalued means for discharging

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MR. PLAYBOY

pent-up emotion.” “The Big Bosom Battle” disagreed with a physician
who recently had called for a deemphasis on female breasts because
they threatened to make women neurotic and create a cultural fixa-
tion. “We just can’t go along with this bosom deceleration,” noted the
magazine. “We agree that there’s a lot of interest in the things, but we
say there can never be too much. Such interest is healthy and adds to
the gaiety of nations .” 10

Pictorials in Playboy elaborated the sex-is-fun theme. A feature
titled “Playboy’s Yacht Party” displayed four scantily clad (and
occasionally unclad) young women going out for a relaxed vacation on
a yacht accompanied by an attentive crew of sailors, while “Playboy’s
House Party” depicted a similar group romping through a sensual day
and evening at a beachside home in Miami. Other typical features
focused on females from various regions of the United States, such as
“The Girls of Hollywood,” which offered intimate glimpses of some
fifteen attractive women where the “sun-kissed strip of California
coast known as Hollywood draws unto itself the most beautiful girls
in the world.” “Minsky in Vegas” described the burlesque king Harold
Minsky and his popular lineup of seminude showgirls at the Dunes
Hotel. Playboy also ran revealing pictorials on a whole series of
Hollywood starlets eager for exposure — Sophia Loren, Kim Novak,
Jayne Mansfield, Brigitte Bardot, Stella Stevens, Marilyn Monroe . 11

Disregarding the sacrosanct quality of traditional discussions of sex,
Playboy consistently used humor to lighten the atmosphere. “Some
people seem to think it’s all right to joke about robbing a bank, when
you wouldn’t actually do it, but they don’t apply the same reasoning
to adultery,” Hefner observed. He penned a humorous article,
“Virginity: An Important Treatise on a Very Important Subject,” in
which he joked that most men saw virginity as an unpleasant mat-
ter to be disposed of quickly. Unfortunately, he added, “this impor-
tant information has been withheld from a large part of our female
population.” Hefner then offered a lighthearted analysis of various
arguments that men could present to reluctant female partners. He
confessed partiality to the “Freudian Approach,” which emphasized
the dangers inherent in frustrating the libido, and the “Atomic Age
Approach,” which posited that the threat of nuclear destruction made
it imperative to live for tonight . 12

Shepherd Mead’s “How to Succeed With Women Without
Beally Trying” series satirized the lifelong male search for female

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companionship. In one installment, he observed that a boy noticing
physical changes in his body was ready to become a man but must “go
through a period which may seem long, but which will actually last no
more than ten or twelve years.” Mead continued, “Never in all the
march of civilization have so many had to wait for so long. But you will
say, as others have before you, that it was surely worth it.” Playboy’s
cheerful take on sexuality also flavored cartoons by Jack Cole, Erich
Sokol, John Dempsey, and Gardner Rea. A typical cartoon showed a
red-faced, pleasantly befuddled tippler who inquired of two Salvation
Army crusaders beating on a bass drum, “You mean if I sow liquor
& dames, I’ll reap liquor and dames?” Regular features such as “The
Ribald Classic,” a series of short, humorous tales of seduction and
romance, and the risque “Party Jokes” page, also sought to replace
sexual solemnity with laughs. 13

Playboy reformulated seduction in the 1950s, depicting it as
neither improper nor immoral, but a social ritual full of romance,
excitement, and anticipation. Hefner filled the magazine with images
and instructions regarding the accoutrements of sexual attraction.
Food editor Thomas Mario articulated the seductive role of fine food
and wine in articles such as “The Breaking of the Fast: Morning
Menus for Two,” which instructed a young man on the proper way to
prepare and present breakfast for a woman the morning after. Blake
Rutherford (the pseudonym of associate editor Jack Kessie) pre-
sented a long series of pieces on the sexual appeal of elegant, under-
stated clothing. Numerous articles on hi-fi systems, the correct way to
mix a martini, and the most powerful, current sports cars underlined
the connection between worldly goods and sexual allure. “Playboys
Penthouse Apartment,” a lavish text-and-sketches article appearing
in September and October 1956, showed how stylish living quarters
provided the ideal setting for attracting and entertaining winsome
young women. In November 1955, Hefner initiated “Playboy After
Hours,” which surveyed a host of entertainment establishments with
an eye toward their romantic ambience. Overall, the Playboy picture
of seduction stressed romance, sophistication, and pleasure. 14

Hefner’s calls for rethinking sex repeatedly emphasized the social
need for a “healthy heterosexuality” in America. Modern pressures
of fashion had converged with traditional repression, he argued, to
warp images of female beauty. Confusion about gender images had
blurred the visual and emotional lines separating men from women

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MR. PLAYBOY

and created a kind of social neurosis. In Hefners view, a regeneration
of vigorous sexual intercourse between men and women promised to
restore vitality to American society. Playboy, as he stressed repeatedly,
was “very much a heterosexual magazine.” The magazine refused to
be “embarrassed by the male-female relationship” and pledged that
“we will vote in favor of a heterosexual society until something better
comes along.” 15

In this crusade for heterosexuality, Hefner took special aim at
womens fashion magazines as architects of androgyny. For several
decades, he noted, they had promoted the ideal of the tall, slender,
angular woman with small bust and thin hips. Many females emulated
this model, but most men recoiled because it was “devoid of sex.”
The male ideal of female attractiveness, Hefner argued, accented a
“full figure, narrow waist, full hips, a very robust and healthy looking
gal.” Playboy devoted itself to portraying this vision of the “fully
feminine — round, soft, and with a maximum emphasis on the beauty
of being female.” 16

In Hefner s view, homosexuality joined with the fashion industry
androgyny to construct another barrier to healthy relations between
men and women. He was no homophobe, and in fact urged toleration
for this sexual behavior. But, like even the most progressive figures
in the 1950s, he saw homosexuality as an aberration, a sign of malad-
justment. “It is the normal, healthy heterosexual thing for men to be
interested in the full, well-rounded female,” he told one magazine.
Why did men like to drive sports cars, wear fashionable suits, listen
to a new stereo, and enjoy good food and drink? he asked rhetori-
cally. “To sit in a corner with a fellow? I rather doubt it.” Playboy, he
made clear, was devoted to “the boy-girl relationship, to heterosexual
activity in modern society.” This provided a contrast to outdoor mens
magazines, which recommended leaving women at home while you
hunted, drank beer, and bonded with other men. “On a F reudian level,
you could consider them blatantly homosexual,” he declared. 17

Hefner elaborated in a roundtable discussion on a CBS televi-
sion show in Chicago. He complained bitterly that fashion magazines
had idealized the tall, thin woman — a “Vogue mannequin” type — and
suggested another influence:

If you want to take the next step and see how really sick its
getting . . . You also know, and the theater in New York is very

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113

much involved in this, where a great deal of this concept of
beauty comes from. This whole fashion thing comes largely
from men. But it’s not a heterosexual concept. And I feel basi-
cally that it is an anti-female concept.

Another participant asked, “You mean a homosexual concept?”
Hefner replied, “Darn right, dam right.” 18

“The Playboy Philosophy,” the early 1960s work summarizing
Hefners early thought on the sexual revolution, clarified this point.
A leading sex researcher, he pointed out, had commented upon “the
prevalence of homosexuality and perversion in the United States”
and insisted that a greater emphasis on male-female sex provided the
only antidote. “If we desire a healthy, heterosexual society, we must
begin stressing heterosexual sex; otherwise, our society will remain
sick and perverted,” Hefner agreed. So while Hefner was not anti-
homosexual, he clearly saw Playboy’s healthy heterosexuality as an
antidote to androgyny and gender confusion, one that promised to
restore American vitality. 19

Hefners notion of “clean sex” promised a healthy alternative to
prevailing, tawdry images of vice and transgression, sin and sensa-
tionalism. Religion, he contended, handcuffed sex to procreation
with any escape eliciting an all-points bulletin describing the offender
as obscene. A similarly twisted state of affairs pervaded popular wom-
en’s magazines, as a Playboy article titled “The Pious Pornographers”
revealed. Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan over-
flowed with sensational articles on topics such as sexual dysfunc-
tion, failed marriages, and scandalous affairs. This “sick, sad sex kick
of the ladies magazines” offered readers a steady diet of “Virginal
Wives,” “Jealousy-Crazed Mates,” and “perverts and child-molest-
ers.” Titillation reigned supreme. “What we were trying to do was
promote a healthier attitude toward sexuality,” Hefner explained.
Playboy suggested that “clean sex, healthy sex in the 1950s was a
prerequisite for a healthy society in America.” 20

For all his passionate proclamations of sexual liberation, Hefner
insisted that Playboy stay within the bounds of good taste. He cham-
pioned the erotic and avoided the pornographic. Images and words
evoking healthy sexual urges were fine, he believed, especially if they
emitted an aura of romance, but sensational, sadistic, and prurient
aspects of sex were out of bounds. But it was not always easy to find

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the line of demarcation. When an advertiser threatened to close the
account over some nude photographs, Hefner asked him to recon-
sider in light of a changing sexual culture in America:

There is a transition taking place in society today that is very
evident in the movies and in books and magazines, too, for
that matter. The nation is becoming more mature and able to
discuss and view openly what was taboo ten or fifteen years
ago . . . Playboy isn’t interested in being sensational — it never
has been. ... If we took the sex out of Playboy, we would be
a fraud, and we know it. At the same time we are concerned
with staying well within the bounds of good taste. . . . However,
treating sex in an adult manner on the one hand — and not
overstepping the bounds of good taste, on the other — is not as
easy a proposition as it might appear . 21

Thus Hefner labored as a popularizer of sexual revolution in the
postwar era. His conviction about “modern man’s need for a new,
more realistic, rational, human, and humane sexual morality” had
been in place long before he even dreamed of starting a magazine,
he explained. But he used Playboy to tirelessly pursue this goal, and
signs were appearing of “a transition from guilt, shame, and hypoc-
risy to a new honesty, a new permissiveness, a new willingness to talk
about sex in a frank and open way — a freedom to examine, to express,
to enjoy .” 22

As the old saying goes, however, a picture is worth a thousand
words. The most celebrated element in the Playboy crusade for
sexual liberation, of course, was visual. The “Playmate of the Month,”
whose revealing fold-out portrait graced every issue of the magazine,
became an American icon. As Hefner noted many years later, “The
Centerfold, in its own way, was as much of a statement in terms of
the sexual revolution as the ‘Playboy Philosophy .’” 23

Marilyn Monroe, in her famous nude pose against a lush backdrop
of red velvet, adorned the first issue of Playboy as its “Sweetheart of
the Month.” By the next issue, the feature had become the “Playmate

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115

of the Month” with a regular format — several photographs of an
attractive young woman, a portion of them erotic, surrounding a nude
fold-out centerfold in full color. It quickly became the magazine s
signature item. At first, Hefner called upon professional models, but
soon he began to look for another type of Playmate — fresh, wholesome
“girls next door” from the byways of ordinary American life. Readers
responded eagerly to this type, prompting the humorist Mort Sahl to
quip that a whole generation of American men came of age believing
that young women had a staple in their midsection.

Hefner did not have to go far to secure the prototype Playmate
of the 1950s. In the spring of 1955, he asked Charlaine Karalus, the
magazine s subscription manager, to pose for the magazine center-
fold. During bantering negotiations, she agreed to be photographed
if he would buy an Addressograph machine to ease her duties at the
office. It was an inspired agreement. Karalus, an elegant, full-figured
blonde with healthy good looks, appeared in the July issue as “Janet
Pilgrim.” Hefner came up with the name as a sly dig at his Puritan
forbearers, and actually appeared in her centerfold as a tuxedoed
figure in the background, back to the camera. This recurring hint of
a man in the centerfold photos implied sex and seduction. Playboy
explained its Playmate concept:

We suppose it’s natural to think of the pulchritudinous Play-
mates as existing in a world apart. Actually, potential Playmates
are all around you: the new secretary at your office, the doe-
eyed beauty who sat opposite you at lunch yesterday, the girl
who sells you shirts and ties at your favorite store. We found
Miss July in our own circulation department, processing sub-
scriptions, renewals, and back copy orders. Her name is Janet
Pilgrim and she’s as efficient as she is good looking. 24

Reader response was so enthusiastic that Pilgrim also appeared as
a Playmate two more times, in December 1955 and October 1956,
establishing a record that still stands. She became something of a
celebrity as admiring cards and letters poured into Playboy from all
over the country. In the fall of 1956, Pilgrim s popularity became evi-
dent when she accepted an invitation for an appearance at Dartmouth
College. She met with an English class, was interviewed on the cam-
pus radio station, held a press conference at the offices of the student

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newspaper, and attended a faculty tea held in her honor. Playboy
took advantage of her fame with a special advertisement. “A lifetime
subscription to Playboy brings a personal call from Janet Pilgrim,”
it promised; “we could think of nothing more special than to have
Playboy’s famed Playmate of the Month call him person-to-person
anywhere in the U.S. on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.” Thus
was born the girl-next-door image that became the hallmark of the
magazines centerfolds. 25

A long tradition of pinup art existed in the United States dating
back to the early 1900s. Around the turn of the century, the Gibson
Girls — pen-and-ink drawings by the illustrator Charles Gibson —
represented the height of female beauty with their lush dresses,
tiny waists, and elaborate curled hair piled atop their heads. By the
1920s, posters publicizing the scantily clad Ziegfeld Girls had per-
meated popular culture while the following decades saw Esquire s
Petty Girls — sleek, stylized drawings of nude young women by the
artist George Petty — and Vargas Girls, lush illustrations of well-
endowed young women by Alberto Vargas. During World War II,
movie-star pinups of actresses such as Betty Grable also became a
popular feature of soldiers’ and sailors’ lockers around the globe. All
of these erotic images shared a common characteristic. They were
highly stylized, idealized renderings of women who were enticing,
yet unattainable. 26

The Playmate of the Month transformed this tradition. Instead
of focusing on movie queens or showgirls, Playboy humanized the
female pinup by presenting young women from everyday life who (at
least theoretically) were attainable, non-intimidating, and possessed
of a healthy sexual appetite. The Playmates were “attractive girls that
we find all over America,” Hefner explained to Mike Wallace in 1956.
“In the past year, one Playmate was an airline stewardess, one a New
York telephone operator, and one a Phi Beta Kappa.” Their typicality
was matched by their modern attitudes. The Playboy centerfold
appeared as an icon of sexual liberation in the 1950s, suggesting that,
as Hefner liked to put it, “nice girls like sex, too.” 27

Hefner described his goal in a 1956 memo to Playboy
photographers:

The Playmate should be posed in a natural setting, not the
sterile surroundings of a studio. The model herself should

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look relaxed and natural. . . . Some simple activity like reading,
writing, mixing a drink, trying on a new dress — the variations
are endless — will add tremendously to the appeal. . . . Obvi-
ously the Playmates should be attractive in both face and
figure, but more specifically, we like a healthy, intelligent
American look — a young lady that looks like she might be a
very efficient secretary or an undergrad at Vassar. We prefer
fresh, new faces ... a natural beauty.

In a letter that same year, he explained to a corporate client
that his magazine featured “the freshest, most all-American look-
ing girls we can find.” The Playmates had become, he argued,
“the photographic dream girls for a large part of our male
population.” 28

The stories accompanying the photos reinforced this natural, real-
istic appeal. They noted the Playmate’s job or activities and discussed
her interests, hobbies, and attitudes. This “personalizes the girl; she’s
not just a rag a’ bone and hank o’ hair. She’s a living, breathing human
being,” Hefner explained. “Playmates are real people and they are
one of the good things in life that you can enjoy when you get up
there and work hard and play hard.” The whole girl-next-door idea,
he noted later, “was intended to make the Playmates more a part of
real life for our readers.” 29

At the same time, important elements of fantasy went into the
presentation of these “real” young women. The photos were artfully
posed to create the illusion of being unposed. The texts accompanying
the photos were verbal creations (often highly exaggerated) designed
to enhance the “natural” quality of the Playmates’ lives and under-
score their sexual interest. Thus Playboy subtly created an erotic
vision. After all, the vast majority of young American women were
not quite that pretty, that healthy, that well-endowed, or, to be
honest, quite that enthusiastic about sex in an age of crude birth
control measures. The Playmate as represented, a workaday yet
fetching young woman who joyfully sought sex, was the fantasy of
the girl next door.

Playmate features in the 1950s embodied this mix of the real and
the unreal. They were about six pages long, including a double-page
spread that expanded to a three-page foldout in 1956 as the word
“centerfold” entered the popular lexicon. The photographs themselves

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were relatively modest. They always featured some kind of drapery
at the waist or were taken from the side or back to avoid revealing
the pubic area. Breasts were bare but seldom showed nipples. Brief
stories described the Playmate as an actress, salesgirl, student, wait-
ress, legal secretary, or in some other kind of normal occupation.
Overall, a relaxed, lighthearted, spontaneous atmosphere prevailed.
While sex in traditional mens magazines like Esquire had a leering
quality “like the old goats who chased showgirls in their cartoons,”
as one Playboy staffer put it, Hefners centerfolds projected a play-
ful, even innocent quality. As a real, attainable female who was
nonetheless a two-dimensional image on a page, gazing directly at the
male reader with an alluring smile, the Playmate offered a promise
of sexual fulfillment. 30

Two Playmates typified the centerfold feature during the
early years of Playboy. A perky platinum blonde named Lisa
Winters graced the magazines pages as the December 1956
Playmate, and the text described her as “the kind of fresh, young
beauty that photographers all across the country are constantly
looking for.” It noted that she loved to read and was partial to
the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the fiction of Poe,
Hemingway, and Kipling. Ms. Winters, a self-described “home
girl,” liked plain food such as spaghetti and chocolate ice cream
and preferred young men who had a sense of humor and avoided
pettiness. The pictorial featured five black-and-white photos of
her fully clothed in various settings in her hometown, two color
photos of her nude wearing a sheer nightgown, and a centerfold
shot of her climbing out of a swimming pool, her breasts care-
fully hidden behind her arm with her face upturned to soak up
the sunshine. 31

Virginia Gordon appeared in a January 1959 pictorial titled
“Girl Who Wears Glasses.” Playboy confessed that the old notion
of librarians as killjoy spinsters, “as well as a Dorothy Parker cou-
plet about girls who wear glasses, have hitherto prevented us from
scouting the libraries of our land in search of gatefold glamour. A little
unbiased cogitation, of course, should have led us to the conclusion
that there’s no reason why a librarian can’t be as lovely as any other
lass, as dewy as a decimal system, as stacked as the stacks she super-
vises.” The text noted that Ms. Gordon enjoyed “water sports, chess
and charades, and she admits to a secret longing to own a Corvette.”

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Four black-and-white photos showed her fully clothed at work, while
the color centerfold depicted her nude, drying her hair with a bath
towel marked “His,” with one leg raised demurely to screen her waist
while her elbows carefully masked the tips of her breasts. 32

While the Playmates captured a restless erotic energy emerging
in the early stages of the 1950s sexual revolution, they also served
another important purpose. The publisher deployed his battalions
of All-American girls to fend off what he perceived as a looming
threat in postwar society: women seeking to entrap men in marriage.
The domestic ideal of family togetherness, so dear to the heart of
Eisenhower’s America, seemed little more than a prison to Hefner.
He urged young men to a spirited resistance. The Playboy agenda of
sexual liberation, in part, aimed to separate the pleasure of sex from
the entangling obligations of the woman-dominated family.

The very first issue of the magazine launched an attack on female
manipulation of marriage in America. Burt Zollo’s “Miss Gold-digger
of 1953” denounced alimony as a weapon used by greedy women to
strip men of their livelihood. The courts, ignoring the fact that modem
divorce often was no ones fault, routinely ordered ex-husbands to pay
ex-wives up to half of their salaries for support. A long list of outra-
geous cases should make men aware that “All-American womanhood
has descended on alimony as natural heritage.” Zollo sharpened the
attack on marriage a few months later in a piece titled “Open Season
on Bachelors.” Modern women sought economic and social security
above all else, he argued, and were “perfectly willing to crush man’s
adventurous, freedom-loving spirit to get it.” The evidence could be
seen in “the sorry, regimented husbands trudging down every woman-
dominated street in this woman-dominated land.” With male freedom
at risk, Zollo argued, the true playboy must “enjoy the pleasures the
female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved.” 33

Throughout the 1950s, Playboy continued to mock traditional
notions of wedded bliss. In 1955, for example, a tongue-in-cheek
article, titled “A Vote for Polygamy,” described monogamous
marriage as a historical anomaly. This practice had been brought
into Western civilization by barbarians who attacked the Boman
Empire, its author contended, and “has since been rejected by
Mohammedans, Buddhists, and residents of Southern California.”
With “varietistic” males naturally seeking many sexual partners and
women rapidly outnumbering them in the general population, the

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MR. PLAYBOY

future was clear: “a return to an older and more practical form of
social-sex organization — polygamy.” In 1958, Playboy surveyed its
readership and reported the mix of husbands and bachelors in this
fashion: “Approximately half of playboy’s readers (46.8%) are free
men and the other half are free in spirit only.” 34

Hefner contributed to this skeptical critique of marriage.
Throughout the decade, he suggested that men should marry later
rather than sooner, if at all. When a reporter asked if he would want his
sister to marry a Playboy editor, he fired back, “I don’t want my edi-
tors marrying anyone and getting a lot of foolish notions in their heads
about ‘togetherness,’ home, family, and all that jazz.” He believed that
social pressures forced people to marry too early and offered himself
as an example. “I had never really been out on my own, never really
been free, which is maybe a part of why this independent, free spirit
thing is as important to me as it is,” he said. When his marriage ended
a bit later, he celebrated his “freedom to do what I want to do, when
I want to do it, and to be able to go where I want to go, when I want
to go there.” 35

In “The Playboy Philosophy,” published in the early 1960s, Hefner
explained his objections to marriage American-style. “The extensive
Puritanism that still exists in American society with its moral prohibi-
tions against sex outside of wedlock, is one of the powerful pressures
leading to early marriages,” he claimed. Heartache often resulted.
A more relaxed, realistic acceptance of “a justifiable place for sex
outside of marriage” would help, as would greater sensitivity to the
emotional needs of young adults. “The typical male selects a mate and
marries her — supposedly for a lifetime — before he has fully devel-
oped, himself, into the adult human being he will be for the rest of
his years. It’s no better than a game of marital blind-man’s bluff, it
seems to me,” he wrote. “If, on the other hand, those first years were
devoted to work and play, as a single adult — then when marriage did
come, a young man would be far better prepared for it.” 36

Hefner’s notions of sexual liberation struck a chord with many male
readers in postwar America. Playboy ’ s fun-filled visions of attractive,
willing females and unfettered sexual pleasure piqued the imagina-
tion of young bachelors operating in an atmosphere of material abun-
dance. The Playmate, in contrast to the grasping woman who had
secured a husband merely to provide economic and social support,

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also offered a fantasy of sexual adventure to older men already caught
up in the gray-flannel world of family and children, station wagons
and backyard barbecues. Hefners vision of sexual revolution in the
1950s appealed to male angst as well as male freedom, frustrations
as well as desire.

Ultimately, however, Playboy’s eroticism promoted a larger cul-
tural development. It helped drive the final nails into the coffin of
traditional Victorian morality, with its notions of self-control, delayed
gratification, and character formation. It encouraged instead a new
idea that happiness came from sating appetites and gratifying desires.
This culture of self-fulfillment had emerged during the early 1900s
but flowered dramatically after World War II. As one historian has
described this process, an old-fashioned, Protestant ethos of “sal-
vation through self-denial” gave way to a new mind-set “stressing
self-realization in this world — an ethos characterized by an almost
obsessive concern with psychic and physical health defined in sweep-
ing terms.” Hefners ideology of sexual liberation played a crucial
role in Hefners important historical shift. The material abundance
of 1950s America — “a period of growth and affluence unequaled in
the past,” Hefner called it — had created a new appreciation for life’s
pleasures. In Hefner’s words, “with the social revolution has come a
sexual revolution as well.” 37

The Playboy fantasy depicted unfettered individuals romping
across a social landscape seeking, and finding, physical pleasure and
emotional fulfillment. It presented images of sophisticated young
men and fetching young women enjoying exuberant sexual experi-
ences, unencumbered by the drudgery of marriage. Hefner reassured
readers that in the modern culture of self-fulfillment, sex could be
“quite properly, an end in itself. And if sex can serve as a means
of self-realization, this is purpose enough and justification enough
for its existence.” It was the quintessential expression of what one
social scientist, writing in the 1950s, termed “fun morality.” In the
transforming morality of modern America, she argued, “fun, from
having been suspect, if not taboo, has tended to become obligatory.
Instead of feeling guilty for having too much fun, one is inclined to
feel ashamed if one does not have enough.” 38

Hefner’s fantasy of sexual liberation embodied this new out-
look. “I think the magazine includes portions of the real world and

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portions of the world of dreams, as well,” he observed. “And I think
it is probably a good thing to include both. Without our dreams and
aspirations, life would be a rather drab affair.” Happily for Hefners
readers, the Playboy agenda for sexual revolution promised a world
that would be anything but drab . 39

An Abundant Life

T he encouragement of pleasure, Hugh Hefner believed, lay at
the heart of Playboy. The sexual element was obvious, of course,
but he always added another theme when discussing his mag-
azine s agenda — a desire to boost “the benefits of materialism” as
another way “to put some of the play and pleasure back into life.”
Hefner believed that the enjoyment of material abundance, like sex,
had aroused guilt for generations in a culture carrying the burden of
Puritan tradition. He wanted to change that. While money could not
buy happiness it could be used, he contended, “to enhance life —
for oneself and others — and that’s what we tried to promote in the
magazine .” 1

Hefner used his “pleasure primer” to promote upward mobility,
worldly success, and material prosperity, creating a full-fledged
endorsement of the consumer-goods explosion in the post-World
War II American economy. “People had money for the first time
in their lives. They were coming out of the war. There were many
new things to own. People had more leisure,” Vic Lownes explained.

123

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MR. PLAYBOY

“The living standards of the country, the productivity of the country
was zooming upwards, and Playboy was a remarkable reflection of all
this. The sexuality, the materialism, it all came at the same time.” 2
Instructing ambitious young men on how to choose from among the
dizzying array of products made available by this dynamic economy,
Playboy helped them navigate through the unfamiliar sea of mate-
rial prosperity facing middle-class America. In the same way that
etiquette books had taught prosperous Americans genteel manners
in the nineteenth century, Playboy served as a guidebook for enjoy-
ing the consumer cornucopia of the 1950s. Monthly, Hefner insisted
that the savoring of abundance, like the enjoyment of sex, prom-
ised to remove older strictures of self-denial and increase human
happiness.

The first issue of Playboy enticed readers with visions of material
plenty. A section titled “The Men s Shop” offered a calfskin-covered
ice bucket “trimmed in high polished aluminum,” a mahogany
“Silent Valet” for hanging suits, a portable bar with “black Formica
top trimmed in red, green, ivory, or chartreuse Duran plastic,” and
a stylish brass coat and hat rack. Soon “Playboys Bazaar,” a self-
styled “buying guide,” appeared to display the latest consumer items
available to the fashionably prosperous. Indeed, in a host of ways,
the magazine promoted the consumption of fashionable clothing and
good food, sporty cars and fine liquor, urbane leisure and hip enter-
tainment as the essence of the good life in modem America. 3

This was no voice crying in the wilderness. As the historian Lizabeth
Cohen has noted, a full-blown “Consumers’ Republic” emerged in
the 1950s from a “shared commitment on the part of policymakers,
business and labor leaders, and civic groups to put mass consumption
at the center of their plans for a prosperous postwar America.” This
project shaped everything from social aspiration to residential pat-
terns, advertising strategies to notions of citizenship, market maneu-
vers to political formulations. But this list of contributors contained
another important type — cultural figures who articulated how the
pursuit of material goods brought happiness. Hugh Hefner stood at
or near the front of this line. 4

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Playboy guided readers through the new postwar society of
consumer abundance, pointing out opportunities for enjoyment and
warning of pitfalls. Its features, advertisements, and symbolic mes-
sages presented the array of goods available to successful young men.
Then, even more importantly, it encouraged them to partake as a
way to achieve joyous fulfillment. “With increasing affluence, how
one spends ones leisure time and finds value in it is more important
than ever,” Hefner noted of this new era. Benjamin Franklin had
written a guidebook for coping with life when a more frugal, work-
oriented ethic was essential to survival in a frontier society. But now
“Playboy came along and offered a new set of ethical values for an
urban society.” The magazine s editorial message was succinct: “Enjoy
yourself.” So at the same time Hefner labored as a pamphleteer of
the sexual revolution in the 1950s, he also served as a popular moral-
ist for the consumer revolution, busily reassuring his audience that it
was okay to feast on the fruits of materialism. 5

Playboy’s campaign for consumption focused on several themes. It
stressed the importance of style in purchasing and enjoying goods as
it nurtured an appreciation of the finer things in life among its young
male readers, many of whom were facing the conundrums of con-
sumer choice for the first time. As the magazine noted of its typical
reader in 1955, “You can find him at the theatre, a concert, or small
jazz spot. He is in the midst of the biggest buying spree of his life.
Cars, cameras, and hi-fi cabinets. Clothes, cognac, and cigarettes.” 6

Playboy directed that buying spree, becoming an arbiter of taste for
young men on the make in an American land of plenty. “The Basic Bar”
provided directions on how to equip a bar in order to “serve the right
drinks, in the right way, at home.” “The Compleat Fidelitarian” and
“The Stereo Scene” offered pointers on the latest developments in
hi-fi equipment,” while “The Verities of Vino” explained the proto-
cols of wine appreciation. On the automobile front, “The Compleat
Sports Car Stable” surveyed the fastest, most elegant American and
European cars on the road. “The Playboy Sports Car” invited readers
to join in the planning of the perfect sports car for today s prosperous,
sophisticated young man. Playboy took the role of consumer adviser
seriously, so much so that occasionally it poked fun at itself. In 1955,
for example, it offered the facetious “Mixing the Perfect Martini,”
where a maniacally fastidious butler poured gin and dry vermouth
from a test tube to get the precise number of cubic centimeters,

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MR. PLAYBOY

measured olives with a caliper to get an exact millimeter reading,
stirred the drink exactly twenty-five revolutions, and twisted a lemon
peel over the cocktail for effect even though no juice came out. 7

One of the most popular Playboy consumer features appeared in
1956. Over two issues, “Playboys Penthouse Apartment” took readers
on a tour of the ultimate bachelor pad, dispensing advice on how
to create a sophisticated urban apartment, “playboy has designed,
planned, and decorated from the floor up, a penthouse apartment for
the urban bachelor — a man who enjoys good living, a sophisticated
connoisseur of the lively arts, of food and drink and congenial com-
panions of both sexes. A man very much, perhaps, like you.” A series
of color sketches showed views of a sleek Scandinavian-style din-
ing room, state-of-the-art kitchen with dishwasher and glass-domed
oven, spacious living room with fireplace and elaborate stereo system,
elegant home office, and master bedroom suite with bedside controls
to operate lights, drapes, and music throughout the apartment and
a bathroom complete with a giant sunken tub and shower. Skylights,
an illuminated aquarium, recessed Swedish fireplace, and a cork
tile floor added to the apartments “sense of masculine richness and
excitement.” Abstract art adorned the walls, a plethora of large win-
dows allowed abundant light, and chic modern furniture by Noguchi,
Bruno Mathesson, Saarinen, Eames, and Knoll graced the rooms.
The apartment appeared “a bachelor haven of virile good looks, a
place styled for a man of taste and sophistication. This is his place, to
fit his moods, suit his needs, reflect his personality.” 8

The subject of clothing occupied a special place in Playboy’s ongo-
ing tutorial on consumer purchasing. Throughout the 1950s the mag-
azine counseled readers on the newest male fashion trends and what
to wear in every type of social situation. “The Well-Clad Undergrad”
advised the well-dressed young man on campus, while the ubiquitous
Blake Butherford addressed myriad fashion issues throughout the
decade with his preference for Continental styling. Throughout
such informational articles, of course, Playboy gently mentored its
audience on appropriate tastes and standards. A 1959 article on for-
malwear, for instance, instructed readers on how to choose “elegant,
good-looking formal attire” for warm-weather occasions:

A black or white dinner jacket is, of course, still correct for
summer or tropical wear. . . . Formal trousers, of course, are

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never anything save midnight blue or black. . . . Black patent
leather or dull calf shoes or pumps are always worn. Your hose,
of course, should always be black. ... No time of year puts
more emphasis on your formal wardrobe than the season com-
ing up. Why? Because this June, July, and August, the country
clubs, yacht clubs, beach clubs, and just plain clubs are going
[strong], . . . Also, if your vacation plans carry you to a resort,
large hotel, or aboard a cruise ship, you’ll find that a dinner
jacket is mandatory for evening wear.

Despite the element of fantasy — one wonders how many Playboy
readers actually frequented yacht clubs or cruise ships — the magazine’s
advice reflected a new sensibility in the middle class. Consumption
demanded a modicum of style, or it became little more than a crass
hoarding of goods, a crude triumph of quantity over quality. 9

Advertising in Playboy reinforced the editorial message of stylish
buying. In fact, the magazine’s advertising policy guaranteed an aura
of upscale consumption. Determined to distance his publication from
the normal run of girlie and pulp magazines, Hefner rejected ads for
products that emphasized tawdry or proletarian themes. He spurned
over 75 percent of advertisers who sought to peddle such items as
“guns, correspondence courses, hair restorers, and trusses” because
they failed to comport with the desired image of prosperity and suc-
cess. “We agreed early on to accept only advertising that seemed to
be consistent with the editorial attitude of the publication,” Hefner
wrote to a company whose ads he had turned down. 10

Hefner stuck to his guns, even though it meant a loss of prof-
its in the short term. In 1955, the magazine landed its first major
advertising account with Springmaid sheets. The initial ad depicted
an eloping couple crawling down a ladder as the buxom bride-to-
be proclaimed to her flustered young man struggling to balance a
hope chest, “Certainly we’re taking it . . . they’re Springmaid sheets
and I have a full chest, too.” Playboy continued pursuing mainline
advertisers, and after several years of limited success — many compa-
nies were skittish about identifying with such a risque publication — it
began to reel them in more and more as the magazine prospered. 11

By the late 1950s, Hefner had successfully linked Playboy to
upscale consumption. The June 1959 issue was typical. Advertisements
appeared for over twenty items of male apparel, including After

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MR. PLAYBOY

Six dinner jackets, Frank Brothers clothes, and “the cool comfort
of Hush Puppies.” More than ten liquor ads appeared, including
Walker Straight Bourbon Whiskey, Bacardi rum, and Bainier Old
Stock Ale. On the transportation front, readers came upon ads for
BMW, Autotourist European Bental Cars, and the Silhouette Mark
II sailing boat.

Home amenities also abounded, with promotions for every-
thing from Crosswinds House beach towels and robes to Scintilla
Satin Bedsheets, Lektrostat Kit record cleaners to Mansfield
Holiday II 8-mm. cameras, Leslie Becord Backs to the Electro-Voice
Musicaster (an outdoor “high-fidelity speaker system for relaxed
enjoyment at the patio or pool”). Personal accessory plugs included
the Bonson Electric Shaver, Max Factor crew-cut hair dressing,
Bogers “Bocket Flame” cigarette lighter, Merrin Gold Jewelry, and
English Leather aftershave and toiletries. Ads focusing on romance
promoted such items as Coty Perfume (“Nothing makes a woman
more feminine to a man”) and the Batch Book, “a new and modem
address book that lets you list every pertinent detail — the surest way
to avoid social errors.”

Playboy iced the commercial cake with advertising for a new
consumer appurtenance: the credit card, which promised added con-
venience and buying power. It claimed that the Diners Club credit
card “is nearly universal in its use. It can be used to buy thousands of
items and services — clothing, dinner, hotel rooms, boats, liquor, tires,
cars, plane trips, luggage, stenographic services, recordings, cameras,
fishing equipment, gifts, flowers — many, many t hings.” 12

By urging its readers to buy “many, many things,” Playboy emerged
at the center of a consumer bonanza in 1950s America. It even estab-
lished a special service in 1957 to assist readers with purchasing goods.
Interested consumers could contact the “Playboy Beader Service,”
which would then provide “the local shopping information you need
to purchase any of the hundreds of interesting items you find featured
in playboy (Playmates excepted). All you have to do is check the
item listed in the Index of Advertisers in which you are interested.”
Always keen to underline the pleasure connection between sex and
abundance, the magazine noted that this service was supervised by
Janet Pilgrim, who was pictured painting footsteps on a floor as a pair
of anonymous mens legs stepped along in the prints. 13

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129

Hefner correctly sensed, however, that American consumer society,
as it evolved to a more advanced stage in the postwar era, involved
more than just buying goods. It was intimately connected to a larger
ethos of pleasure, leisure, and entertainment. Uninhibited consump-
tion depended on the emotional joys of self-fulfillment, not the moral
satisfactions of self-denial. Playboy, in a host of 1950s articles and
features, encouraged just such a creed of gratification.

Recreation took the lead. “Playboy on Poker” explored winning
strategies for the card game, while “The Art of Travel” taught inex-
perienced travelers how to move about the country and the world
“with special ease and grace.” It explained guidebooks, travel agents,
how to assemble an itinerary that suited individual tastes, and how
to evaluate tour packages. “Invitation to Yachting: Playboys Guide to
Fun Afloat” perused luxury watercraft and their deployment for the
weekend sailor. Advertisements plugged a host of nightclubs for
the sophisticated young man and his date: Chicago favorites such as
Morton s, Sardis East, Blackhawk, and the Cloisters, and out-of-town
nightspots such as Rendezvous of the Stars in L.A. and the Sands in
Las Vegas. 14

Musical entertainment featured prominently in Playboy’s recipe
for recreation. Hefner was a longtime fan of jazz, and promotion
of this genre abounded. “Bird” described the saxophone virtuoso
Charlie Parker and his fantastic, wailing performance style. The
noted jazz critic Leonard Leather penned many features, including
“Ella Meets the Duke,” a look at icons Ella Litzgerald and Duke
Ellington, and “Sinatra,” an analysis of the most influential vocalist of
the era. The Playboy Jazz Poll debuted in 1957, with readers voting
annually on the best singers and instrumentalists at every spot in the
typical band. Some twenty thousand ballots selected such luminaries
as Stan Kenton as bandleader, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie
on trumpet, J. J. Johnson and Jack Teagarden on trombone, Benny
Goodman on clarinet, Dave Brubeck on piano, Lionel Hampton on
vibes, and Gerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond on sax. Sinatra and
Litzgerald won out as male and female vocalists. 15

Sports regularly moved into the Playboy spotlight, especially
Hefners two favorites, boxing and college football. The magazine
offered an annual ring preview such as “Boxing 1956,” which weighed
the prospect of fighters like Rocky Marciano, Archie Moore, Lloyd

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MR. PLAYBOY

Patterson, and Sugar Ray Robinson. In September 1957, Playboy
introduced its first college football forecast as Anson “Smoky” Mount,
who had been running the College Rureau, took over the job for
the next fifteen years. He proved himself to be one of the most accu-
rate football prognosticators in the country as “Pigskin Preview”
became an annual feature. Throughout, Playboy seized every chance
to connect sport with consumption, promoting an array of sporting
goods including Abercrombie and Fitch golf clubs, Hedland water
skis, and skin-diving masks and underwater cameras. 16

Movies, another Hefner pastime, attracted much attention in
Playboy. “Playboy After Hours” reviewed the latest American and
European film releases while articles on movies, actors, and the
Hollywood scene cropped up regularly. “The Horror of It All” explored
the popular appeal of Hollywood horror films, while “Chaplin: The
Chronicle of a Man and His Genius” examined the career of the bril-
liant comedic actor. Rilly Wilder, Hollywood’s hottest writer-producer-
director, received a close analysis in “Charming Rilly.” Attention also
focused on theater. In December 1956, two veteran critics — Wolcott
Gibbs from the New Yorker, and Ward Morehouse from Theatre
Arts — offered their assessments of “Rroadway: The Season Just Past,
the Season to Come.” 17

Playboy fed its readers a nourishing diet of humor. Cartoons, again
reflecting the publishers own taste and background, emerged as a
magazine stalwart. Early contributors such as Jack Cole and Gardner
Rea were joined by a new cadre of hip funsters by mid-decade. In
1956, Shel Silverstein brought his irreverent sensibility to the maga-
zine with a series of globetrotting cartoons, one of which pictured him
talking to a stem butler at Ruckingham Palace, who said, “I believe
I can say with assurance, sir, that Princess Margaret will not be inter-
ested in appearing as January’s Playmate of the Month.” In August
1958, Playboy introduced “The Sick Little World of Jules Feiffer,”
describing the cartoonist as someone with “more than a touch of the
psychoanalyst and the social critic in his makeup.” Feiffer special-
ized in visually minimalist, conversation-heavy encounters between
men and women that pointed out human foibles and hypocrisies. The
grotesque, macabre work of Gahan Wilson also became a Playboy
favorite. A typical cartoon depicted a disheveled scientist in a lab coat
straining to hold a laboratory door shut against a giant, multicolored
blob pushing it open, as he told a superior, “It turns out, well have

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no trouble producing the new drug in large quantities, sir!” Hefner
worked with all the cartoonists, particularly inspiring the Babs and
Shirley series — it featured a pair of single, sexually adventurous
roommates — drawn by the cartoonist Al Stine. 18

Playboy’s growing reputation for presenting high-quality fiction
moved down the same path. As the Los Angeles Times noted in 1957,
“Some of the best short fiction written in America today is being
published in Playboy. These short stories are gutty and imaginative,
skillfully written, and — perhaps most important — experimental.”
Indeed, writers such as John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Arthur
C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, P. G. Wodehouse, and Charles Beaumont
appeared in its pages throughout the late 1950s. Yet much of the
writing fit more comfortably into an entertainment than a literary
mode. The magazine presented morsels of fiction that were usually
digested easily, providing a greater portion of pleasure than thought.
Typically, it described the lead fictional piece in January 1958 as “a
yarn that has all the elements of exciting story telling — suspense,
ironic humor, a pip of a plot, and a twist ending — written with flair
and flavor.” The same issue also contained the magazine’s annual
$1,000 prize for fiction, which it awarded to “the past years most
entertaining story.” 19

Playboy s promotion of a leisure culture of consumer self-
fulfillment went beyond the abstract. Throughout the 1950s, Hefners
enterprise cashed in on the pleasure-oriented message of the maga-
zine. It developed a multifaceted merchandising campaign — clothing,
albums, books, personal accessories — devoted to the enjoyment of
abundance. By 1957, a leatherette Playboy Binder for collecting
issues of the magazine and Playboy cufflinks had appeared along with
three books: The Third Playboy Annual, Playboy’s Party Jokes, and
Playboy’s Ribald Classics. Soon neckties, tie tacks, bracelets, sport
shirts, sweaters, playing cards, and bar accessories came forward, all
adorned with the magazine s rabbit head logo. By 1959 a line of jazz
albums, the Playboy Model Agency, and Playboy Tours joined the
list. Hefner also branched out with a syndicated television show and
a national chain of nightclubs. In much the same way that the postwar
Walt Disney Company utilized synergy to meld movies, television,
merchandising, and theme parks into an entertainment empire,
Playboy, Inc., integrated various projects into a cohesive enterprise
to promote its vision of leisure, pleasure, and material abundance. 20

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MR. PLAYBOY

Not all Hefners expansion activities were successful, however.
Playboys growing profits inspired him to launch a satire magazine
titled Trump in late 1956, but sales lagged badly. Other money leaks
opened around the same time. Hefner had invested a large amount of
funds in the new offices on Ohio Street when his banker unexpectedly
pulled his line of credit. With no working capital, a financial crisis
ensued. Hefner took strong measures: cutting 25 percent from all
executive salaries, giving up his salary entirely, discontinuing Trump,
and temporarily giving up 25 percent of his company’s stock to help
secure a bank loan for $250,000. As he confessed in July 1957, “This
has been a rough six months — months of difficult decision and of
payment for some wrong decisions in the past.” 21

But the setback was only temporary. The magazine righted itself by
the end of 1957, secured a major national distributor, and continued
its long-term trajectory of growth. Playboy and Hefner steadily estab-
lished themselves as symbols of the new prosperity, and nowhere did
this appear more clearly than in a successful campaign to link plea-
sure with upward social mobility.

In April 1958, Playboy proudly reported the results of a study of
American magazine readership. Conducted by Daniel Starch & Staff
and published in the annual Consumer Magazine Report, the survey
assembled economic and social statistics on the readers of all major
magazines in the country. It concluded that Playboy had a younger,
more affluent, and better-educated audience than any other of the
fifty magazines surveyed, jostling with the New Yorker and U. S. News
and World Report in many categories. Its readers not only led the
pack in spending on travel, automobiles, liquor, and tobacco but
bought more “electric coffee makers, food mixers, fans, irons, and
toasters.” Its typical reader was “at the peak period of purchasing”
and highly attuned to success, Playboy noted proudly. As the maga-
zine concluded, “It’s gratifying to know that this constellation of attri-
butes, this orientation of the personality, is possessed by the men who
are — statistically — the leaders in their liking for, and ability to attain,
the good things of this life.” 22

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133

Hefner immediately began featuring the Starch Report in
advertising his magazine, launching a campaign around the familiar
slogan, “What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?” According to the ads,
the Starch survey “shows the average Playboy reader has a higher
income than the reader of any other mens magazine. The Playboy
reader is younger, too. 75.5% of all Playboy readers are between
18 and 34, the acquisitive age when every purchase is a brisk step
ahead.” Ads stressed readers’ extensive education, high professional
and business standing, taste for liquor, fine cars, travel, clothes, and
entertainment. In sum, the typical reader was successful and poised
to consume: “Although they’re younger — the median age of the
Playboy reader is 28 — they have a higher household income than
the readers of any other men’s magazine. And Playboy ranks highest
of all men’s magazines in consumer statistics for tobacco, beer, whis-
key, wine, wearing apparel, photographic equipment, automobiles,
and radios.” 23

Clearly, Hefner had achieved one of his fondest goals by the late
1950s — to make Playboy synonymous with a modern ethos of pros-
perity and social attainment. The Starch Report seemed to prove his
contention that pleasure-seeking paved the road not to dissipation
but to worldly success. Now Hefner sought to cement his victory by
addressing one of the most publicized cultural upsurges of the era.

The “Reat Generation” had attracted much attention by the late
1950s for its posture of detached, cool, hipster alienation. Led by
writers and poets such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the
movement disdained the bland conformity of middle-class, suburban
life and celebrated primal experience, drugs, and personal freedom.
Playboy covered the Reats as well as any magazine in the country.
It published a 1958 symposium on “The Reat Mystique,” exploring
“aspects of the new nihilism — frozen-faced, far out, devoid of nor-
mal meaning” — and analyzing the emotional deadness resulting
from “the great triumvirate disease of the American male — Passivity,
Anxiety, Roredom.” Kerouac himself probed “The Origins of the
Reat Generation,” suggesting that the movement he had christened
came out of a revulsion against middle-class norms, a search for genu-
ine emotional experience, a fondness for popular culture icons like
the Marx brothers and the Three Stooges, and an indigenous “old
American Whoopee.” 24

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MR. PLAYBOY

In one sense, Playboy tried to co-opt the movement. It presented
Yvette Vickers in the July 1959 issue as the “Beat Playmate” who hung
out at hip coffeehouses and clubs in Los Angeles exchanging ideas
and discontent with like-minded souls. “She’s interested in serious
acting, ballet, the poetry of Dylan Thomas,” noted the text. “She
has strong opinions and is more than a bit of a rebel, frowning prettily
on conformity.” The centerfold photograph depicted her lying on her
stomach on a sofa, nude from the waist down, wearing only a man’s
shirt. With a frazzled look on her face, an empty bottle of wine, a full
ashtray, and an open book of poetry sitting next to her on the floor,
she reached down to spin albums on a hi-fi. 25

Mainly, however, Hefner made the Beats a foil for his efforts to
define the Playboy audience. While sharing their discontent with
the dowdy, “square” aspects of traditional American values, he found
their style appalling. Disillusionment, drugs, and despair had little
kinship with the Playboy ideal of sophisticated style, social achieve-
ment, and material prosperity. So Hefner coined a phrase to describe
his readership and its effort to reform and revitalize, not reject, main-
stream American society, “playboy has become, in its first five years,
the voice of what might be aptly called the Upbeat Generation,” he
announced in 1958. 26

Hefner returned to this phrase again and again in discussing his
loyal, and growing, audience. “When the Beat Generation became
a cause celebre and we reported on it, and Kerouac wrote for us,
I made a case for what I called the Upbeat Generation,” he recalled
years later. Instead of dropping out of society, the Upbeat Generation
sought to “embrace the play and pleasure aspects of life along with
the work. So we were rejecting the notion of conformity, but turning
life into a celebration that incorporated capitalism.” 27

In a private letter, Hefner asserted that if Playboy “is to truly be a
much-needed rebel voice for the Upbeat Generation — then it’s got to
holler long and loud about all those sacred cows” of sexual repression
and asceticism. In a radio interview, he suggested that while the Beat
Generation had attracted much publicity, a “much larger portion of
the same generation is also equally unwilling to conform to the old
ideas and ideals, but wants to do something about it — and we refer
to them sometimes as the Upbeat Generation. These are the guys for
whom Playboy has meaning. We suggest that life can be an awful lot
of fun, if you work hard and play hard, too.” 28

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In a long statement to a Chicago magazine, Hefner embedded the
Upbeat Generation in a broader reading of American history. After
World War II, he contended, many people had moved to the suburbs
and become obsessed with security and conformity.

But now from behind the generation of static, controlled people
came a new generation. We now have two generations — one
behind each other — with the biggest gap between them of
any other two generations in the history of this country. I’m
convinced that the present generation, we like to call it for
reasons of promotion the Upbeat Generation, is our true sal-
vation. And Playboy fits that generation more than any other
magazine. 29

Ultimately, the agenda of the Upbeat Generation represented a
revamping of the old American creed of opportunity and mobility.
Playboy’s message expressed a “strong belief in the wonderful
opportunities that exist in this country if a person is willing to work
to achieve something and make something of himself,” Hefner
wrote to a friend. “ Playboy says to its readers, the world is a wonder-
ful place; enjoy it, live it to the hilt, work hard and play hard, and you
will make this a better world for yourself and for those around you.”
He was confident of victory, telling a reporter, “Kerouac’s got a few
beat guys over in his comer, but we’ve got all the rest.” 30

In 1959, Hefner hosted an event that seemed to celebrate the
vitality of the Upbeat Generation. The Playboy Jazz Festival took
shape as a gala concert that gathered the biggest jazz luminaries in
America for three days of performances. Victor Lownes undertook
the organization and promotion of the event and originally booked it
at Soldier Field. Then the city fathers reneged on the agreement
because of pressure from the local Roman Catholic Church, which
denounced any city affiliation with Playboy. After receiving much
support in the local press, Hefner and Lownes were able to secure a
new venue at Chicago Stadium. 31

From August 7 to 9, a who’s who of American jazz took the outdoor
stage at the stadium: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie,
Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman
Hawkins, Stan Kenton, Oscar Peterson, and many others. Comedian
Mort Sahl emceed the festival, and some eighteen thousand listeners

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MR. PLAYBOY

attended every night. A jubilant Hefner sat in the front row as Sahl
quipped, “This should prove to skeptics that Playboy magazine is
interested in more than one thing.” When Hefner was introduced at
the intermission on the last night, he asked if there should be another
festival next year and the crowd roared its approval . 32

Playboy made no money from the event, turning over all proceeds
above expenses to Chicago’s Urban League. But it gained something
much more valuable: an upgrading of its reputation. As Variety
observed in a highly favorable assessment of the concert, “there’s
little doubt the affair did enhance Playboy’ s institutional status.” In
comments to Billboard, Victor Lownes revealed just how much.

Our main object is to improve the image of the magazine in
the eyes of those advertisers who have not yet stopped to read
it, but who judge it merely by the centerfold. We want to bring
home to these advertisers that Playboy covers all the interests
of the smart, young American male. Accomplishing this is
worth a considerable bit of money to us.

By pulling off this prestigious event, the magazine took a large step
forward in establishing itself in the mainstream. Connecting itself to
images of sophisticated entertainment, leisure, and upward mobility,
it demonstrated that it was hip but not beat . 33

Hefner’s upbeat message of social success and material abundance
showcased one final dimension. “The emphasis on hi-fi, sports cars,
good food and drink, good entertainment, good literature and music
is to stimulate our young men to educate themselves so they can make
enough money to enjoy these benefits,” he told the Saturday Evening
Post. “In this way we can help overcome the educational gap between
ourselves and the Russians. Our mission is to make this the Upbeat
Generation instead of the Beat Generation, and thus perform a ser-
vice for America.” This desire to help his country in the prevailing
atmosphere of Cold War tension revealed an ideological dimension
in Hefner’s enterprise. Engaged in a confrontation with the global
forces of communism, the United States attempted to define and
defend an American Way of Life based on consumer prosperity as
well as democratic freedom. On this front, Playboy stood prepared
to play a heroic role . 34

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III

In the summer of 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon journeyed to
Moscow as the head of a delegation to open the American National
Exhibition at a trade fair. While touring the model of a suburban
home from the United States, he engaged Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev in the famous “Kitchen Debates.” Nixon maintained
that the prosperous standard of living for ordinary citizens in the
United States would fuel its long-term triumph, insisting that televi-
sion sets, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other consumer
amenities were the weapons that ultimately would win the Cold War.
Khrushchev mocked this notion. But Nixon s rhetoric revealed much
about the tight link between the desire for economic security and
national security. The ability to choose from among an abundant array
of material items set off the United States from the gray, drab, uni-
form existence of communist societies and defined its notion of the
good life. 35

In many ways, Playboy embodied this ideological impulse. In terms
of style, of course, the magazine could not have stood further from
the stodgy Eisenhower administration, whose leader once allowed
that his favorite band was Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. But
on matters of political economy, Hefner stood shoulder to shoulder
with Nixon and avast majority of his fellow citizens. Americas ability
to produce and consume an array of items represented the essence
of the modern free enterprise system.

Clearly, Hefner and his magazine lay in the mainstream of Cold
War corporate liberalism. Like both major political parties, Playboy
displayed an essential belief in modern consumer capitalism along
with an endorsement of government controls to keep its excesses
in check. To this consensus, Hefner and his magazine added strong
elements of free expression and nonconformity regarding cultural
issues. Playboy’s politics in the 1950s were capitalist in their endorse-
ment of entrepreneurial free enterprise, progressive in its belief in
the necessity of government regulation, and libertarian in its empha-
sis on individual freedom on social and cultural matters. While usu-
ally proceeding indirectly — the Upbeat Generation tended to find
political disputation distracting and uncool — the magazine positioned
itself as a defender of the American Way of Life. Far from being

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MR. PLAYBOY

subversive, as some of its more hysterical critics contended, Playboy
insisted that adoption of a pleasure ethic would strengthen America
in its struggle with communism.

At the heart of Hefners ideological message lay a total commit-
ment to individual freedom. This bedrock belief emerged in part
from his reading of American history, which concluded that an opti-
mistic, rags-to-riches, success-seeking creed had animated its citizens
until the Great Depression brought an obsessive concern with pro-
tecting the average, ordinary individual:

Because of a veiy valid concern for the average man, for the
common man, who was in trouble, little by little, much of
the viewpoints expressed in the mass media began to empha-
size not only concern for the common man, but almost a kind
of idealization of him. . . . Then on into the war years for
another half-dozen years, beginning in the Forties, confor-
mity of another kind took hold. . . . Well, out of all this came a
tremendous de-emphasis of the importance of the individual
and individual initiative, and a tremendous de-emphasis on
education. . . .

All of a sudden we realized, and on a very practical level,
too, that the country had almost stood still for 20 years. All of
a sudden the world s greatest power was a long way short. . . .

But with the new generation, there seemed to be an unwill-
ingness to accept a lot of these old taboos, old traditions, old
concepts. ... I think Playboy is a part of this. 36

Hefner consistently stressed that “individual freedom in terms of
sexual behavior was of a piece with individual freedom in the free
enterprise system.” He believed, in his own words, that the genius of
capitalism allowed “the best ideas and the best people rise to the top,
or at least have a chance to compete. And everyone benefits from that
on eveiy kind of level.” 37

At the same time, Hefner firmly supported government regula-
tion of the economy. In the tradition of twentieth-century progres-
sivism, he asserted that a free, competitive society would not “remain
free or competitive very long . . . without some controls; complete
laissez-faire capitalism wouldn’t give us free enterprise any more
than anarchy would give us political freedom.” While competition

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139

and profit-seeking should be encouraged, “you need government to
control, to referee the game.” So while Hefner endorsed the free play
of individual ambition, he also contended that it should be kept from
mutating into destructive greed and power-mongering. He was, in his
own phrase, a disciple of “enlightened self-interest.” 38

Moreover, in the 1950s Hefner was clearly anticommunist. In a
memo on a Charlie Chaplin story for Playboy, he observed that the
comic genius had made a serious mistake in endorsing leftist radical-
ism during the 1930s when “Communism was not clearly seen as
the totalitarian dictatorship it is today.” In a private letter, he again
denounced communism as “a totalitarian dictatorship that permits no
opinion but its own, and I happen to be a boy who believes fervently
in democracy and freedom of expression.” 39

Hefners stubborn libertarian streak also pushed to the fore,
particularly in issues involving free speech. He denounced any
kind of censorship, either from interest groups or from the govern-
ment. In 1959, for instance, controversy arose when the police chief
in a San Francisco suburb banned Playboy because of “obscene”
pictures. A newspaper storm erupted, with Congresswoman Kathryn
E. Granahan (D-Pa.), chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Postal
Operations, denouncing the “billion dollar a year smut racket” and
claiming a connection among lewd materials, juvenile delinquency,
and communism. Hefner vigorously defended free expression.
“If the reading material of the citizens of any community is to be
pre-selected — a pretty abhorrent thought in itself — I can’t think of
anyone less qualified to do it than a local police chief,” he told the
Associated Press. 40

Hefner also raised the banner of free speech in defending against
McCarthyism. Although anticommunist, he was disgusted by the
Red-hunting crusades initiated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his
ilk. After a reader complained about Playboy’s willingness to publish
articles by leftist writers, Hefner offered a ringing defense of free
expression in a democracy:

playboy sincerely believes that this nation is big enough, strong
enough, and right enough to give free expression to the ideas
and talents of every man among us without fear of being hurt by
any man’s individual weaknesses or follies. . . . [America] prides
itself on fair play and believing a man innocent until proven

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MR. PLAYBOY

guilty. But that’s really beside the point — for we appreciate
Picasso as one of the world’s greatest living artists, and we know
he’s a Communist. Politics may be important in government,
where national security is a vital consideration, but it has no
place in art and literature. Not if America’s art and literature,
and indeed the country itself, are to remain free. 41

Hefner’s libertarian positions on matters of sex and politics
aroused the ire of the FBI. In 1957, he reported that FBI agents
visited the offices of Playboy to inquire about a pictorial being shot
called “Photographing Your Own Playmate.” They also visited Millie’s
apartment, asking about her husband’s activities, and put the pub-
lisher under surveillance. According to documents in Hefner’s FBI
file, agents were combing through Playboy as early as 1955 look-
ing for obscenity and unfavorable references to the Bureau or the
director. 42

Nonetheless, the magazine maintained a mainstream political pos-
ture that was reflected in Hefner’s own political loyalties. In 1952,
he vacillated between Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. “Millie and
I belong to that happy group known as independent voters, and this
year we’re pulling for Ike,” he noted initially. But then he switched
to Stevenson, contending that “his unusual qualifications for the job
outweigh all other considerations.” At the end of the decade, he
observed that if Playboy were a political magazine, “it would probably
be Bepublican in almost all of its national views. I know that I am.
I don’t dig Socialism — I think it’s unworkable and tends to make men
sit on their asses instead of working hard to better themselves.” This
posture continued well into the mid-1960s. 43

Hefner’s centrist politics influenced his love of the “New Comics,”
humorists who eschewed gags and one-liners for satirical musings
on contemporary mores and issues. He first encountered this free-
form comedy in the improvisational shows of the Compass Players
(later Second City), a Chicago group that satirized the stodginess
and hypocrisy of mainstream America. Then Mort Sahl, who styled
himself “America’s only working philosopher,” appeared. Wearing
a sweater and brandishing a rolled-up newspaper in one hand,
he developed an intellectual, stream-of-consciousness style that skew-
ered prevailing shibboleths in politics, foreign policy, ommunism, and
religion. On the issue of segregation, for instance, Sahl noted that

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141

“Eisenhower says that we should approach this problem moderately.
But Stevenson says we should solve the problem gradually. Now if we
could just hit a compromise between those two extremes . . .” Hefner
also became a fan of Lenny Bruce, the outrageous “sick” comedian
who used a stream of four-letter words to caustically dissect the age of
Eisenhower. Commenting on everything from funeral homes to dope
addiction to homosexuality, Bruce typically observed of the news-
paper headline “Flood Waters Rise, Dikes Threatened,” “It’s always
the same. In times of emergency they pick on minority groups.” 44

Hefner promoted Sahl and Bruce heavily in Playboy, believing
them to be allies in a common cause — “questioning the conformity
and repression of the times.” The publisher shared a political sensi-
bility with the New Comics that was more a matter of cultural style
than policy pronouncements. Sahl and Bruce had no real quarrel
with the Cold War or capitalism. With their jazz vocabulary, sophis-
ticated urbanism, and irreverence for authority, these comics, much
like Hefner and Playboy, represented a movement to loosen the
system culturally and morally rather than revamp it politically or
economically. 45

Playboy’s vaguely progressive political temperament prompted a
gradual engagement with social issues. It published Vance Packard’s
“The Manipulators,” a scathing critique of corporate researchers who
studied people’s hidden needs and anxieties in order to sell products.
“Eros and Unreason in Detroit” criticized the American auto industry
for producing shoddy, tasteless cars that appealed to the “one great
fault with most American males: an irrational fear of impotence.”
“The Cult of the Aged Leader” questioned the geriatric domination
of all branches of government. In 1959, Playboy issued a special edi-
torial sounding the alarm about nuclear testing and the dangerous,
perhaps deadly, release of the radioactive element strontium-90 into
the atmosphere. A responsible, reformist political sensibility domi-
nated all these pieces. 46

Perhaps the most remarkable testament to Hefners mainstream
politics, however, came in a 1960 letter to Ronald Reagan, then presi-
dent of the Screen Actors Guild. The publisher had learned from a
mutual friend that Reagan had been upset by an article in Playboy
authored by Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten.”
So he wrote to the actor assuring him that “We, here at Playboy,
don’t dig Communism and don’t dig Communists — I don’t like

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MR. PLAYBOY

Communism and the fundamental things it stands for.” However,
Hefner continued, censorship and blacklisting represented a “step
toward tyranny” and was “precisely what this country is fighting
against and what all totalitarian nations, Communist Russia included,
have always stood for.” A free society, he argued, demanded a “pro-
cess of freely exchanging divergent ideas, instead of trying to shut up
the ones with which we do not agree.” 47

The letter encapsulated Playboys politics in the 1950s: pro-
entrepreneur, anticommunist, pro-individual expression, anti-
censorship. As a voice of a respectable opposition, Hefner sought
to loosen the restraints of the system while staying firmly within
it. Navigating a course between the stultifying conformity of the
Eisenhower age and the jagged alienation of the Beats, Playboy
and its publisher represented an official counterculture. Much like
Theodore Roosevelt and his crusade for a “vigorous life” at the dawn
of the twentieth century, Playboy mounted a revitalization movement
that sought to inject sexual energy, social style, and masculine power
into a tired mainstream society in order to strengthen it for struggle
against hostile foes. As Hefner expressed it beautifully in a newspaper
interview at the end of the decade, “We’re trying to project an accept-
able rebel voice.” 48

Promoting consumer abundance as well as sexual liberation,
Playboy provided a powerful boost to the full-blown culture of self-
fulfillment that was sweeping away the last vestiges of Victorian
self-denial. As Hefner once put it, launching Playboy “was like a
mission — to publish a magazine that would thumb its nose at all the
restrictions that had bound me.” 49

Hefner and Playboy, in defying older rules of restraint, gave voice
to his era’s yearning to meet all needs, satisfy all desires, sate all appe-
tites. This crusade, he explained, aimed at “challenging the two greatest
guilts our society has: materialism and sex.” Hefner had gambled that
his own desire to partake of sexual and material abundance was shared
widely in postwar society. He had presented a magazine reflecting his
interests, his tastes, his desires, himself, “not exactly as I exist, but as
my dreams existed. The kind of guy that I aspired to be.” The bet paid
off. Playboy’s popularity revealed that many others had similar visions
of the good life and wanted to be the same kind of guy. 50

Living the Fantasy

T he signs were hard to miss. As Playboy took off in the mid-1950s,
its youthful editor and publisher began to spend increasing
amounts of time with shapely females who regularly appeared in
the magazine’s offices. Ray Russell raised his eyebrows one day when
a young woman showed up and stayed a long time in his boss’s office.
“I realized she wasn’t there on business. It shows you how naive I was
in those days that I was shocked, because after all, Hef was a married
man” he observed. “I wised up soon enough in the years to come as
the stream of young ladies filed in and out of Hef’s office.” 1

Victor Lownes stumbled across another indicator of his boss’s sex-
ual adventures. A common female acquaintance let slip about Hef’s
“little black book” she found on his night table. It listed girls he dated
and “there were some coded markings” that apparently “referred
to various specialties in the sex department.” It also listed one of
the older, dowdier females on the Playboy staff as one of his past
conquests. When Lownes asked Hefner if he had really slept with
her, the publisher admitted he had. Lownes inquired mischievously,

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MR. PLAYBOY

“Was she better looking in those days?” Hefner thought for a moment
and replied, “I hope so.” 2

Such was the emerging pattern of Hefner s private life in the 1950s.
As Playboy gathered steam, its young publisher gradually adapted his
own life to the new atmosphere of fantasy he had invoked. In many
ways, it was not an easy process. Shy, sentimental, and largely uninter-
ested in fashionable clothes, fast sports cars, and fine food and liquor,
Hefner did not gravitate naturally to sophistication. Moreover, he was
married with two small children. So his embrace of a Playboy lifestyle
emerged only in fits and starts, beginning with a series of girlfriends
and liaisons that contributed to the steady crumbling of his marriage.

Near the end of the decade, however, Hefner fully reinvented
himself. Publicly, and with great fanfare, he adopted the Playboy
ethos of sexual revolution and material abundance. He also under-
took several projects involving television, nightclubs, and a fantastic
mansion that brought to life the magazine s fantasies of pleasure.

With his keen intuitive sense, Hefner grasped the growing impor-
tance of celebrity in postwar America. In a consumer culture devoted
to leisure and entertainment, celebrities from the world of mov-
ies, television, sports, and glossy magazines — those, according to
Daniel Boorstins famous quip, who were “well-known for their well-
knownness” — assumed central places in popular consciousness. Mass
communication broadcast larger-than-life images of people on the tele-
vision screen or glossy magazine page and created an illusion of actu-
ally knowing them. As Richard Schickel has observed, in this muddle
of public and private life these “intimate strangers” gained a powerful
influence. As arbiters of manners and opinions, celebrities became
“the chief agents of moral change in the United States.” In the 1950s,
Hefner emerged as just such a celebrity. As Mr. Playboy, projecting
images of a dream-come-true life of sexual and consumer plenty, he
emerged as the impresario of the pleasure ethic in postwar America. 3

With the founding of Playboy, work and play became inseparable
elements of Hefners life. With increasing regularity, he collapsed
from exhaustion in the small adjoining bedroom at his Superior Street
office and stayed overnight. Subsequently, his Ohio Street office suite

LIVING THE FANTASY

145

contained a separate bachelor apartment with a bedroom, dressing
room, and bathroom. Both settings hosted dalliances with a series of
young women. Steadily distancing himself from a strained marriage
and a family in which he had declining interest, he threw himself
into a life he felt had been denied him in young manhood. Hefner
became a playboy about town.

The nightclub scene on the Near North Side, not far from the
magazine s Ohio Street offices, formed the background for Hefners
revitalized social activities. While Chicago was an old-fashioned,
machine-run city under the domination of Mayor Richard Daley and
heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, the Near North Side flour-
ished as a bohemian haven full of artists and art galleries, newspapers
and journalists, restaurants and clubs. The area around Rush Street
was particularly boisterous, filled with nightclubs such as Mr. Kellys,
the Black Orchid, the Cloisters, and the Chez Paree. With a gang of
buddies — Victor Lownes, Shel Silverstein, comedian Don Adams,
agent Lee Wolfberg, and club owners Shelly Kasten, Skip Krask, and
John Dante — Hefner prowled the nightspots of the area in the early
morning hours after leaving his office around midnight. The group
played poker and gin rummy, shared drinks and music, and often
went out for breakfast as the sun came up. “Chicago was the swing-
ingest town in the entire world,” Adams noted of the atmosphere.
“It was like New Years Eve every night.” 4

Casual sexual conquests punctuated these boisterous male gather-
ings. The nightclubs were full of women, and Hefner, like the others,
successfully wooed, according to Kasten, “show girls, waitresses, hat
check girls, gals off the street.” One night they all had too much to
drink and, in Krask’s words, they “organized an orgy.” During the
revelry, he and Kasten snapped a picture of Hefner in bed with two
girls. Several nights later, as a prank, they gave him an envelope they
claimed some guy had dropped off. It contained a print of the sala-
cious picture along with a note demanding $500 to keep it out of the
newspapers. The publisher looked stricken and turned so pale that
they quickly stopped the joke. 5

The Playboy offices, bubbling with sexual intrigue, provided
an equally vibrant social atmosphere. In a setting where breaking
down walls of sexual restraint was company business, vigorous
young men and women, unsurprisingly, developed attractions.
Affairs flourished. Ray Russell fooled around with girls in the office

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MR. PLAYBOY

“with some regularity,” according to a colleague. Bev Chamberlain
and Vince Tajiri had an extended affair. Janet Pilgrim hooked up with
advertising executive Phil Miller. Eldon Sellers and Anson Mount
began socializing with their wives and, according to Sellers, “these get-
togethers often took the form of wife-swapping hanky-panky.” Staff
parties often turned libidinous. On Ohio Street a version of the “play-
pen” at the Lownes-Sellers apartment — four beds bolted together
side by side — was erected in the photo studio for physical encoun-
ters. At one wild Christmas gathering, two usually staid staffers spent
several hours necking and petting heavily on a couch in the middle
of the room. “Their concentration and their stamina were amazing,”
remembered Arlene Bouras. As Bussell once cracked, “At most com-
panies you’d be fired if you fooled around on the job with somebody
you worked with. At Playboy it was grounds for promotion.” 6

Hefner surged far ahead of the pack with his sexual escapades.
By 1955 he had begun dating a series of young women. First came
Shirley Delancey, who along with her roommate, Mary Ann Lajoie,
was a dancer at the Empire Boom in Chicago’s Palmer House. (They
served as the inspiration for Babs and Shirley . ) He went out with
Connie Chancellor, ex-wife of then Chicago television broadcaster
John Chancellor. He had flings with several magazine employees:
Playmate Janet Pilgrim, personal secretary Pat Pappas, and assistant
photo editor Bev Chamberlain. In 1956, Hefner began seeing Sheila
Browning, who worked at Chicago’s Gaslight Club, as well as the
popular Playmate Lisa Winters. Upon visiting Hollywood for the first
time, he attended a party at photographer Earl Leaf’s home in the
company of starlets Suzanne Sidney and Joan Bradshaw that, in his
words, “ended in a multi-partner orgy.” He even had a one-night
stand with Janie Sellers, an old high school friend who had had a
crush on him for years. There were others — many others — as Hefner
estimated he had around fifteen to twenty liaisons a year. 7

Some of the publisher’s colleagues did not approve of his sexual
adventures, especially with coworkers at the magazine. Art Paul
derided his boss’s pursuit of many women on the staff as “the old
sophomoric notches on the bedpost” mentality. Marge Pitner also dis-
approved because it created personnel problems. Female staffers he
dated “figured they didn’t have to show up for work on time anymore,
like they were privileged characters or something,” she observed. 8

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147

Not surprisingly, Hefners marriage grew strained. Millie lost
patience, concluding that his sexual pursuits were an obsession dat-
ing back to adolescence. Her husband did not try to hide his affairs,
spending little time at home and confessing when Millie confronted
him. The couple had a rocky relationship for the five years after
Playboy started, with long interludes of separation punctuated by
brief reconciliations. “The fault is all mine, of course, and I’m in that
unhappy state where I seem to be unable to live either with or with-
out her,” Hefner told his brother in 1956. 9

But from among the dozens of sexual dalliances that Hefner had in
the last half of the 1950s, three young women emerged as special girl-
friends. They were companions with whom he had genuine relation-
ships, and their experiences revealed much about the man behind the
masthead. Betty Zuziakwas an eighteen-year-old coed at Northwestern
in 1957 when she met Janet Pilgrim and got a job at Playboy in the
subscription department. A cute, perky girl with an affectionate man-
ner and relaxed style, she met Hefner at the staff Christmas party,
felt an instant attraction, and lost her virginity to him. “I fell hard,
and was very much in love — my first major romance,” she described.
The publisher saw her steadily over a four-year period from 1957 to
1960. He went to her apartment several times a week — accumulating
stacks of parking tickets in the process — where they would spend quiet
evenings listening to records, watching television, and eating home-
cooked meals. Hefner described Zuziak as “a warm and comfortable
companion” and their relationship as a “shelter from the storm, an
escape from all my responsibilities into our own private little world of
simple pleasures and pastimes.” For her part, Zuziak was content to
be “with him because I cared for him.” 10

While seeing Zuziak, Hefner met a teenage model and beauty-
contest winner named Joyce Nizzari while visiting Miami in 1958.
They felt an immediate attraction and spent several nights
together “imagining we were falling in love with one another,” in
Hefners words. He invited her to Chicago, and over the next couple of
years they saw each other frequently. With medium dark hair, lovely
features, and a lithe figure, Nizzari accompanied Hefner to the Cannes
Film Festival and Kennedy Inaugural Ball and they had an intense
relationship at various periods from 1958 to 1961. Hefner described
her as a “special lady” in his life and even visited her parents’ home

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MR. PLAYBOY

in Miami during one trip there. Nizzari became a Playmate in the
December 1958 issue of Playboy , n

In 1959 Hefner met Joni Mattis. She came from a troubled back-
ground, having spent part of her childhood in a Baptist orphanage
after her mother died and her father entered the service during World
War II. When her father returned home from the service, he sexu-
ally molested her. As a teenager, she became pregnant and gave up
the baby for adoption, then lived with a sternly Christian foster cou-
ple before marrying a rigidly religious man who treated her harshly.
She began modeling and met Hefner while serving as an usherette
at a movie theater, dressed in a French maids costume. A petite,
demure young woman with enormous dark eyes and pale skin, she
resembled a Dresden doll and exuded a sense of intense vulnerability.
Mattis and Hefner were mutually smitten and enjoyed passionate
interludes from 1959 to 1961. She would appear as a Playmate in
November 1960. When the romance ended, the two remained close
friends and Mattis would go on to work for Hefner until her death
in 1999. 12

Hefners serious relationships with Zuziak, Nizzari, and Mattis
revealed much about his mental and emotional qualities. They
brought to light competing, even contradictory impulses in his
personality — on the one side a sweet nature, romantic sentimental-
ity, and endearing lack of sophistication, and on the other a tendency
toward distrust, possessiveness, and egotism.

Hefner’s shy, simple nature struck all of the young women with
whom he became involved. Unpretentious and a homebody, he
veered toward card games with his buddies, fried chicken dinners,
films, and pasting pictures in his scrapbook. “He had a little-boy qual-
ity about his enthusiasms that I found utterly charming,” said Zuziak.
He exhibited a basic shyness, noted Mattis, and even a kind of vul-
nerability. He loved to sit home and watch television shows such as
The Twilight Zone, or dash out for a late-night movie followed by a
cheeseburger at a local diner. Dressing respectably, but with little
concern for fashion, he always wore white socks because of a foot
fungus he had picked up in the army. 13

Hefner had a warm, sweet temperament. “He was extremely
romantic and I ate that up,” Zuziak reported. “He was constantly
sending me flowers and gifts.” On one occasion he presented her with
a piece of jewelry containing a white pearl set with a diamond chip

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149

and a smaller black pearl. The pearls embodied their relationship,
he told her, with the smaller black one, representing unhappiness,
being totally dominated by the larger white one, standing for love
and affection. “We held hands a lot and did a lot of hugging and
cuddling,” Zuziak noted. Mattis had a similar experience, as Hefner
displayed great concern for her feelings and treated her, according
to that archaic phrase, like a lady. During their romantic evenings or
weekends, he would order champagne, play jazz records, and talk
quietly with her. As she once put it simply, “he was real sweet .” 14

But alongside these romantic qualities stood less attractive ones.
Hefner felt a need to maintain dominance in his relationships with
women, an impulse, according to Zuziak, that was rooted in a fear of
female betrayal from Millies affair with the coach many years before.
He controlled relationships because giving up power meant showing
weakness and demonstrating vulnerability. Exposing chinks in ones
emotional armor to women, who could wound you emotionally, was
dangerous and unacceptable . 15

This instinct to dominate produced a powerful egotism in Hefners
romantic relationships. When one of the staffers at Playboy opined
that he was seeing women who weren’t good enough for him, he
replied frankly, “Well, if I start going out with movie stars then
I wouldn’t have someone who was more interested in me than in her-
self.” All his girlfriends noted that he focused on his own needs, while
they were forced to adapt to his schedule, desires, and preferences
if they wanted to see him. Some feared losing themselves completely
from being swallowed up in his world. “His relationships are basically
I, I, I, I. . . . It was very, very difficult,” said Zuziak . 16

Hefner also could be possessive, even callous, toward women
who were close to him. He felt free to see any attractive female who
caught his fancy, but wanted exclusive devotion from his girlfriends.
According to one, “He had a total double standard. He served notice
that he would be seeing others, but he expected me to be totally loyal
to him.” Moreover, Hefner could be remarkably insensitive to his
girlfriends by exhibiting obliviously his latest conquest. “Hef broke
my heart. You know, he’d parade them right in front of me,” Mattis
complained. “I’d be sitting there, and then he’d have a girl, and he’d
just walk right in front of me. Take the girls into his room .” 17

Occasionally, Hefner’s girlfriends would grow frustrated and strike
back at him. Zuziak arranged a casual date every once in a while to

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MR. PLAYBOY

make him jealous. Mattis adopted more extreme tactics, such as one
time when at a party where Hefner was showing too much attention
to Ann Richards, a singer in Stan Kentons band, she sidled up and
nudged her into the swimming pool. She also began spending time
with Frank Sinatra to make Hefner angry. 18

Hefners affairs in the 1950s had predictable domestic conse-
quences as his marriage, already on shaky ground, began to crum-
ble. He was almost never at home, and awkward episodes involving
Millie and his girlfriends mounted steadily. On New Years Eve in
1955, when she was pregnant with their second child, Millie went to
a Playboy party and “there was Hef sitting over there with a girl, and
necking with her,” she recalled later. “I just walked out, hailed a cab,
and went home Another time, Millie came up to the magazine offices
with the children. Janet Pilgrim, who had been having an affair with
her boss, became visibly upset and left. According to a coworker, a
few weeks later she hastily married and it “lasted about a month.” 19
Hefner had concluded that his marriage, because of basic incom-
patibility, was hopeless. After their official separation in the summer of
1957, he ruminated that “in the end, she has suffered the most from
it, for I have the magazine to keep me going.” An embittered Millie
complained that her husband lacked the capacity to be faithful. “This is
the way hes behaved all the time I’ve known him,” she said. “There was
never a time that I knew him where I felt we had a one-to-one relation-
ship.” His disregard of parenthood became a particularly painful point
of contention. “He didn’t particularly want children,” Millie noted. “He
went along with it. But he was not a father.” As weeks went by during
which Hefner would not see Christie or David, she nonetheless assured
the children that “Daddy was good, and Daddy was caring, and he was
so busy he didn’t have a lot of time, but he loves you.” But he did visit
periodically, and, Millie admitted, “In his way, he cared, too.” 20

Finally, the marriage ended. In March 1959, after reaching agree-
ment in advance with her husband, Millie sued Hefner for divorce
on the grounds of desertion. She asked for custody of the children
and alimony, receiving both, while he received rights of regular visita-
tion. The pair had negotiated the terms on an amicable basis and they
accepted the divorce in a positive light. Millie made plans to remarry.
“Hef has no marriage plans, thinks the publisher of playboy should
be a bachelor, hopes to remain that way for a long time,” Hefner

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noted in a letter. “All remains more than friendly on all sides and the
new marriage should be best for everyone — Millie, the children, and
all.” And, indeed, Hugh and Millie would stay on fairly good terms
over the next several decades. 21

These private adventures set the stage for a seminal event in
Hefners life. In the late 1950s he transformed himself, much as he had
done before his senior year in high school, when he dropped the nice,
middle-class, boyish Hugh for the jive-talking, swing-dancing, saddle-
shoed Hef. Now, with his marriage over, his magazine enjoying boom
times, and new social vistas opening up, Hefner remade himself. F rom
a private cocoon where he labored as a workaholic and lothario, he
emerged onto the public stage as a pipe-smoking social butterfly with
a string of beautiful women on his arm. He became Mr. Playboy.

Readers opening the June 1957 issue of Playboy, expecting to find the
usual preview of the magazine’s articles and features in the “Playbill,”
were surprised. “This month we’d like you to meet Editor- Publisher
Hugh M. Hefner, the man responsible for the pulse, the personality,
and the very existence of this magazine,” began a different introduc-
tion. The piece described a night owl who arose just before noon and
worked into the early hours of the morning, a man who shouldered
many tasks as the head of a dynamic men’s magazine. Above all, it
stressed how his personal style reflected that of his readers:

His dress is conservative and casual, he always wears loafers,
and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola, which he consumes at the rate
of two dozen a day, is never far away. There is an elec-
tronic entertainment wall in his office . . . [and] Brubeck,
Kenton or Sinatra is usually on the turntable when Hefner
is working.

He is essentially an indoor man. . . . He likes jazz, foreign
films, Ivy League Clothes, gin and tonic, and pretty girls —
the same sort of things that playboy readers like — and his
approach to life is as fresh, sophisticated, and yet admittedly
sentimental as is the magazine’s.

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MR. PLAYBOY

A full-page picture of Hefner showed him standing on the bottom
stairs at the entrance of the Ohio Street offices, looking coolly
upward as an attractive blonde a few steps below stared flirtatiously
at him. 22

In such fashion, Hefner stepped out from behind his desk and into
the public limelight as he remade his image in the late 1950s. His
motivation was personal, but the makeover reflected a larger trend
in American popular culture as the decade ended. The ideal of the
team-oriented business executive, the family man in the gray flannel
suit, moved to the sidelines before a new ideal of the vibrant, vigor-
ously heterosexual male who was bold, irreverent, hip, and successful.
The new type popped up everywhere — in fictional figures such as
James Bond, in politicians such as John F. Kennedy, and in entertain-
ers such as Sinatra and the Rat Pack. In the public imagination, Hugh
Hefner joined this group as he personified the Playboy lifestyle 23

In fact, the magazine incessantly promoted the icons of the new
male ideal. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Playboy’s idoliza-
tion of a suave, handsome fictitious secret agent from Her Majesty’s
Secret Service. When Kennedy, the glamorous new president,
announced that he was a fan of Ian Flemings spy novels with their
fictional hero, James Bond, he confirmed a Playboy favorite. The
magazine had introduced Flemings character in March 1960 with
“The Hildebrand Rarity,” a short story, and over the next few years
the dashing spy would become a mainstay of the publication. With
his casual elegance, beautiful women, fast sports cars, and space-
age gadgets, Bond embodied the magazine’s fantasy appeal for men.
Fleming actually visited the Playboy offices in 1960, and the magazine
proudly reported his comment: “I’m sure James Bond, if he were an
actual person, would be a registered reader of playboy. ” Hefner was a
big fan, once writing Fleming to offer the environs of his magazine as
a setting for a future story. The Bond phenomenon, both in book and
movie form, as well as the sexy women who adorned the films, would
appear regularly in Playboy , while Fleming and Sean Connery (the
cinematic Bond) would be the subjects of interviews. 24

Similarly, the magazine offered admiring treatments of Frank
Sinatra and the Rat Pack. Hefner had idolized the popular singer for
many years, and a 1958 Playboy profile describing him as “the most
potent figure in show business today, the most spectacularly popular
singer of popular songs, the most sought after movie star, the most

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successful wooer of women.” By the late 1950s, Sinatra, along with his
sidekicks — singer/dancer Sammy Davis Jr., comedian Dean Martin,
actor Peter Lawford, and comic Joey Bishop — had become the epit-
ome of modern male celebrity with their suave manner, sophisti-
cated wisecracks, undeniable talent, and womanizing reputations. A
1960 Playboy feature on the Rat Pack described how they filled the
Sands nightclub in Las Vegas every evening while filming the movie
Ocean’s Eleven. Calling them “the innest in-group in the world,”
it characterized the Rat Pack as “a very special gang of Hollywood
rebels . . . [who] possess talent, charm, romance, and a devil-may-care
nonconformity that gives them immense popular appeal.” 25

Around this time, Hefner began hanging out with Sinatra and his
cronies. Sammy Davis, who frequently performed at the Chez Paree,
a Near North Side club directly across the alley from the Playboy
offices, became a frequent visitor and a good friend of the publisher.
In September 1960 Hefner hosted a party for the Rat Pack after one
of their performances in Chicago, and two months later Hefner and
Lownes were invited to attend a Hollywood stag party for Davis, an
African American who was about to enter a controversial marriage
with the blond Caucasian actress May Britt. 26

Hefners endorsement of the new male paradigm also surfaced in
his involvement with John Kennedy’s bid for the presidency in 1960.
He donated money to the campaign under the auspices of Sinatra, who
had gained entry into Kennedy’s circle through Lawford, Kennedy’s
brother-in-law, and subsequently championed his cause among
Hollywood entertainers. Hefner was attracted to the youthful sena-
tor’s sympathy for civil rights, a special cause for him, and saw him as
a progressive figure eager to overturn the stodgy traditionalism of the
Eisenhower era. Typically, he looked through the prism of the movies,
perceiving in Kennedy “a Frank Capra view of society that I strongly
supported. He was, to me, a ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,’ ‘Meet
John Doe’ president.” But Kennedy’s vigorous masculine aura also
appealed. Hefner admired the young senator for being “a handsome
swinger,” in his words. “He had personal karma and sex appeal that
was appealing on both the political and personal fronts. The joke at
the time was that Kennedy would do for sex what Eisenhower had
done for golf,” Hefner recalled later. “He was one of us.” 27

After Kennedy’s election, Hefner secured tickets and went to
Washington, D.C., to celebrate the new president’s taking office.

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MR. PLAYBOY

On January 20, 1961, he and Joyce Nizzari, along with Victor Lownes
and a date, attended an Inaugural Ball organized by Frank Sinatra
for Hollywood, Broadway, and entertainment stars. Hefner rented a
Georgetown town house and limousine for the occasion. A few days
after the inauguration, Hefner and Lownes flew to New York City for
a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. at Carnegie Hall, which featured
entertainment by Sinatra and his Bat Pack. 28

Thus Hefner associated himself with Bond, Sinatra, and Kennedy
as a prototype of the new male in the popular imagination. After
returning from the Cannes Film Festival in the summer of 1959,
where he rubbed shoulders with a host of film stars, the publisher
was primed to project a new celebrity image. He began to dress more
fashionably, started smoking a pipe, and gave numerous interviews
elaborating on his personal life. Purchasing a Mercedes-Benz 300SL
convertible, he appeared in an ad for the car where he posed comfort-
ably leaning against it in front of the entrance to the Playboy offices.
Hefner also pursued self-promotion in the pages of Playboy, reassur-
ing a skeptical associate that “as a living personification of the maga-
zine I can’t quite see where my presence within the book is anything
but positive.” 29

The press picked up the signals as stories stressing Hefner’s celeb-
rity status began to appear. The Chicago American presented a big
spread in June 1960 with a piece called “The Playboy Behind Playboy.”
“For all practical purposes, Hefner is Playboy,” it said. “Its personal-
ity is Hefners and vice versa.” Others followed quickly. A feature in
the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune described Hefner as “the country’s
hardest working playboy.” Surveying his daunting editorial routine
and personal endeavors, it concluded, “As he works, he manages to
live the life glorified by his magazine.” By 1961, press accounts rou-
tinely elaborated this theme. The titles revealed all: an AP story called
“Playboy’s Playboy Hugh Hefner Lives American Male’s Dream” and
a UPI story titled “Serious ‘Playboy’ Built an Empire with Pretty
Girls.” 30

The public creation of Mr. Playboy, however, was difficult. Not a
natural sophisticate, Hefner remained a hardworking, quietly intense,
sentimental, and introverted guy with a fondness for the simple things
in life. The quest to become a polished, urbane role model often only
highlighted his ordinary tastes in food, drink, and clothing. The ironic
picture of “the publisher of a magazine devoted to the sophisticated

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life, fine wines & haute cuisine, etc. subsisting almost exclusively on
Pepsi and fried chicken” amused his friends, as well as Hefner himself,
according to Ray Russell. Similarly, girlfriend Retty Zuziak described
Hefner as “a very simple, honest, totally unsophisticated man . . . prior
to the pipe and all that, when they began to push his image.” 31

Thus the appearance as Mr. Playboy demanded a makeover of
much of Hefners personality. Zuziak sensed a fraud. She believed
that, in fact, he became “caught up in a monster he created” and
began “playing a part” to meet public expectations. “At what point
do you separate reality and the fantasy?” she asked. However, this
plausible contention overlooked the fact that Playboy, from the very
beginning, was an exercise in sexual, emotional, and material fantasy.
So if Hefner was playing a role, it was one he believed in wholeheart-
edly. It brought him front and center stage in American society, where
he could convince his audience that fantasy could be more powerful,
more real, than reality. He utilized the props of cars, clothes, women,
interviews, and publicity, but the real opportunity to shape a persona
came with a trio of projects that provided an even larger stage for
projecting the Playboy dream of the good life. 32

Ill

In the few months from October 1959 to February 1960, Hefner
launched a television program, bought a magnificent Gilded Age
mansion in Chicago, and opened the first Playboy Club. These ini-
tiatives changed his life forever. They made him not just a spokesman
for but the major practitioner of the Playboy lifestyle. Transforming
his daily life into, in his words, “a fantasy perception of bachelorhood
that had heretofore merely been reflected in my magazine,” Hefner,
indubitably, became Mr. Playboy. 33

In the late summer of 1959, the publisher began developing a
syndicated television show titled Playboy’s Penthouse. It would
be “a ‘Playboy Party’ complete with our ‘Playmates’ and outstand-
ing personalities from the fields of entertainment and the arts,” he
told the Chicago Sun-Times. He commissioned Cy Coleman, noted
songwriter of tunes such as “Witchcraft,” to compose a theme song
for the show, and created a format based on a cocktail party held in a
chic bachelor apartment. 34

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MR. PLAYBOY

The first segment was broadcast in the late evening of October 24,
1959. Hefner, outfitted in tuxedo and pipe, welcomed several famous
guests — Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Lenny Bruce, and author
Rona Jaffe — to his “apartment,” which was set off with sleek modem
furnishings. Surrounded by beautiful young women, he traded small
talk with the entertainers before their seemingly impromptu per-
formances. Joyce Nizzari and Eleanor Bradley discussed their expe-
riences as Playmates, Shel Silverstein described his worldly travels
doing cartoons for the magazine, and A. C. Spectorsky explained his
“Kitchenless Kitchen” for the modern bachelor quarters. The latest
fashions, witty repartee, elegantly dangling cigarettes, and clinking
martini glasses embellished the proceedings. 35

In part, a business rationale lay behind the program. While the
Jazz Festival had upgraded Playboy as a viable advertising medium,
Hefner hoped that “the syndicated television show would do the
same on a national basis.” The magazine had an image problem with
many general readers and needed to distance itself from any taint
of “filth and obscenity,” Victor Lownes told Sales Management. The
television show would help. With its vibrant images of the good life,
the program promised to be “an ideal showcase for our advertisers as
well as for the talent on the show,” he explained. 36

But the program also had a larger aim — bringing the Playboy
vision of happiness to life. Hefner insisted on a format and content
that would draw the magazine s “particular editorial personality and
point of view into the show.” In so doing, of course, it would show-
case Hefner and his new image. Everything reinforced this gambit,
from the opening, which rolled credits over a filmed background of
him driving his Mercedes convertible around Chicago at night, to
the setting in a sophisticated bachelor pad, to his debonair appear-
ance. As Lownes confirmed, the show was a “logical extension of the
magazine into a new medium — the Playboy lifestyle brought to life.
With [Hefner] himself as Mr. Playboy, of course.” 37

But the project faced a recurring difficulty — Hefner was not a very
good host. He would open the door to the camera and say rather grimly,
“Good evening, I’m Hugh Hefner. Welcome to the party.” Surrounded
by pretty girls, he labored gamely, attempting small talk and witticisms
with the entertainers, venturing insights and observations with the
intellectuals. He even adopted the pipe as a prop because, in addition
to lending an air of elegance, it occupied his hands. But he came across

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as awkward, wooden, and tense, more Gary Cooper than Cary Grant.
“I was stiff, ill-at-ease and ill-prepared for the role of a performer,” he
confessed later. “I was an amateur and my on-camera performance
made Ed Sullivan look like a polished pro.” 38

Nonetheless, the show became a vehicle for Hefners growing
celebrity. The power of television — bringing live images of the pub-
lisher and his lifestyle into living rooms throughout the country —
enhanced his public renown. Advertising also contributed to the
self-promotion. Playboy plugged the show and its host while an ad
released to national media outlets carried a large photo of Hefner
with a text describing its setting: “swank surroundings high above the
city’s throng, you’ll meet the stars of show business, famous authors
and artists, celebrities and, of course, playboy’s lovely Playmates of
the Month.” A TV Guide promotion contained a picture of Hefner
against a mass of Playmates and a breathless text: “everyone in
Chicago knows this man! Bevies of beautiful women surround
him! Headliners from the entertainment world are his guests, and
enliven his sophisticated parties! Handsome, suave, urbane — lie’s the
envy of every man, the idol of every woman!” 39

While not a huge hit, Playboy’s Penthouse did well. Shot in
Chicago at WBKB, it was syndicated to twelve other cities, including
New York and Los Angeles, and got respectable audience numbers.
The reviews were generally positive, although most noted Hefner’s
limitations as a host. Variety, for example, observed that the show
“has freshness, some degree of sophistication, and some good talent
along with it,” while Hefner was “somewhat awkward as an emcee
but is excellent as a conversationalist.” For participants, the show
was fun to shoot. A genuine party atmosphere prevailed much of the
time, even to the extent that guests drank real liquor to keep things
loose through multiple takes. On more than one occasion, Hefner
recalled, “performers were somewhere between tipsy and inebriated
when they appeared.” 40

The twenty-six-week first season included guests such as comedians
Bob Newhart and Don Adams; musicians Sarah Vaughan, Stan
Kenton, Tony Bennett, and Count Basie; and author Carl Sandburg.
A second season began in September 1960 — Sammy Davis Jr. starred
in the opening — with a new hourlong format. Reviews were even
more positive. “In most respects this is a highly improved product in
the area of production and presentation, notably where host Hugh

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Hefner is concerned,” stated the Chicago Sun-Times. “Hefner is
more relaxed. Last season he reminded me of the stuffy neighbor
who unbends once annually to let in the kiddies on Halloween night.
Now he seems more composed, more deliberate about showing off
something he wants to share (I mean the cats, silly, not the girls).”
Nevertheless, at the conclusion of the second season, Hefner and
WBKB decided the show had run its course. 41

Around the same time, Hefner undertook a second project that
became a crucial part of Mr. Playboys mystique. He created a fantasy
home, the Playboy Mansion, in which he could actually pursue, with
great fanfare, a lifestyle of bachelor freedom and abundant living.
For the last few years, he had been living at his office, while keeping
a small apartment on Astor Street that he rarely used. By late in the
decade he grew determined to occupy a home suitable for the new
public image he was shaping. He first planned to build a four-story
town house on the Near North Side, but he ran into problems with
city regulations and spiraling estimations of cost. So Hefner began to
look for an existing structure that could be remodeled, and he soon
located the perfect one. 42

A. C. Spectorsky and his wife, Theo, were in their apartment reading
and listening to music on a Sunday afternoon in December 1959 when
the doorbell began ringing frantically. It was Hefner, who came running
up the stairs to announce that he had just bought the house across the
street. He led them over for a quick tour of the huge structure, much
of which was unoccupied, dingy, and full of dust and cobwebs. But the
excited editor convinced them that he would soon make it into a show-
place. He did so, and about a year later, according to Theo, as they sat
in the great room by the fireplace, he “looked over at me like a little boy
and said, ‘the greatest thing I ever did was to buy this house.”’ 43

Hefners dream home sat at 1340 North State Parkway, on
Chicago’s famed Gold Coast and two blocks from Lake Michigan. The
four-story, brick-and-limestone mansion had been built in 1899 for
Dr. Henry Isham, a prominent Chicago physician. A social center in
the city during the early part of the century, it had welcomed famous
guests such as Theodore Roosevelt and Admiral Richard Byrd before
being divided into apartments during the Great Depression. The size
of a small hotel, it sat behind an ornate iron fence and offered a mod-
est lawn, driveway, and annex. Its most prominent feature was a huge
ballroom on the second floor about the size of a basketball court with

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an enormous marble fireplace at one end and imposing French doors
at the other. Two stories tall, with open beams on the ceiling and two
enormous bronze chandeliers, the room was adorned with pillars and
decorative features of carved wood. Two suits of armor would soon
guard the entryway, while several modem masterpieces of abstract
expressionism would enhance the paneled walls. Hefner refurbished
the numerous apartments and bedrooms in the mansion, many of
which had marble fireplaces. 44

The editor installed two unique features that soon became legend-
ary. First, below the ballroom he built an indoor swimming pool deco-
rated with palms, and a recessed grotto. On one side of the pool sat a
bar with a glass wall allowing visitors to look directly into it, with the
entire complex accessible either by stairs or by a fireman’s pole from
the floor above. Second, in a suite off the ballroom on the second floor
Hefner designed his famous master bedroom. The centerpiece was a
large, rotating round bed that had controls for television, stereo, tape
machines, lights, and music in the headboard. As the proud owner
noted, this gadgetry “helped give it a James Bond mystique.” The bed
became not only the nest for Hefners romantic trysts, but command
central for his organization as he soon littered it with memo drafts,
page proofs, and photo stills. Once again, work and play became insep-
arable elements in his life. 45

After several weeks of renovation and decoration in early 1960,
Hefner quickly established a party scene at the baronial Playboy
Mansion as the make-believe revelries of Playboys Penthouse became
the real thing. A. C. Spectorsky gave him a brass plaque for the front
door that read in Latin, “Si Non Oscillas, Noli Tintinnare,” translated
as “If You Don’t Swing, Don’t Ring.” Hefner hosted the first big party
in May 1960 and others soon followed. “Major parties at the mansion
became an almost weekly event, with a couple of hundred people
invited. They usually started around midnight and went until dawn.
The parties were centered in the ballroom, and included an exten-
sive buffet, drinking, dancing,” Hefner explained. After the renova-
tions were completed, the parties spread into the swimming pool, the
adjoining game room, and the underwater bar. The mansion’s kitchen
remained open twenty-four hours a day for guests, and the ballroom
had a theater-sized movie screen that descended out of the ceiling,
allowing Hefner to show 35mm films, both old and current, to dozens
of his friends. 46

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MR. PLAYBOY

The mansion soon attracted enormous publicity. The Chicago
Tribune ran a big spread in its Sunday magazine early in 1961, and
major stories on Hefner and his home soon appeared in Time and the
Saturday Evening Post. The most striking publicity, however, came
in the pages of Playboy. In December 1961, Hefner ran a lavish ten-
page feature in the form of a pictorial on a “gala house party” held in
honor of the magazine’s eighth anniversary. Opening the doors of the
Playboy Mansion to his readers, Hefner showed visiting Playmates
around “his opulent digs.” Readers caught glimpses of nude girls
cavorting in the famous pool and grotto, while the pipe-and-slippered
host explained his elaborate stereo and collection of abstract expres-
sionist paintings by modern masters such as Pollock and de Kooning.
The article also carefully noted the many celebrities who had visited
the mansion, including Fr a nk Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Hugh O’Brian,
Stan Getz, Mort Sahl, and Tony Curtis. 47

If Playboy’s Penthouse provided Hefner a public forum, and the
Playboy Mansion a private one, for presenting himself as Mr. Playboy,
a third undertaking invited his audience into the picture. On February
29, 1960, the first Playboy Club opened at 116 Walton Street in
Chicago. “It will be an attempt, endorsed by these editors, to project
the plush and romantic mood of the magazine into a private club of
good fellows interested in a better, more pleasurable life,” Hefner
explained in an internal memo at Playboy. Victor Lownes explained
it more simply: “the idea was to bring the magazine to life.” The
Playboy Club, which soon would spread to cities all over the United
States, vividly framed Hefners new celebrity lifestyle by permitting
others a brief taste of it. 48

The publisher had entertained the idea for a club when he and
his club-hopping pals discussed the fantasy of having their own place
to hang out. “Having our own club would be a real kick and a great
way to meet chicks,” Hefner recalled. As the magazine became popu-
lar, the idea broadened to include the Playboy lifestyle. An article
on Chicago’s Gaslight Club in the magazine — thousands of readers
wrote in asking about gaining membership — gave a direct prod to
begin the project. Hefner and Lownes realized there was a large
market for a nightclub centered on the Playboy idea of pretty girls,
fine food and drink, and sophisticated entertainment. They began to
formulate plans. 49

The first step involved bringing in someone with practical experi-
ence. They contacted an old friend, Arnold Morton, who owned a

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club that Hefner and Lownes frequented on their nocturnal rambles.
He agreed to join the project, and the trio divided responsibilities —
Hefner and Lownes developed the concept and were responsible for
overall management while Morton, in his words, handled the “meat
and potatoes.” They also divided the shares of the new company with
Lownes getting 25 percent, Morton 25 percent, Hefner 25 percent,
and the magazine 25 percent. When the doors of the first Playboy
Club swung open, it reflected Hefners recommendation: “The main
thrust of our creativity is to bring the pages of Playboy to life.” 50

The five-story club wove together thematic strands from Hefner s
magazine and television show. It offered good food, generous drinks,
and hip entertainment in a sophisticated atmosphere. Drawing upon
the bachelor apartment fantasy, it contained dining areas styled the
Living Room and the Playmate Bar, and large rooms for music and
comedy shows called the Penthouse and the Library. The Cartoon
Corner offered framed cartoons from Playboy, while an elaborate
stereo system piped jazz throughout the structure. Wood-paneled
walls, rich colors, and leather furniture enhanced the ambiance.
A crucial aspect of the lifestyle formula lay in the illusion of exclusiv-
ity. Members paid an initial fee of fifty dollars to become a lifetime
keyholder and received a Playboy Key stamped with the familiar rab-
bit head logo. “The Playboy Club is a meeting place for the most
important, most aware, most affluent men of the community,” the
magazine observed. A special publication for members appeared
called VIP: The Playboy Club Magazine that carried stories about
personnel, entertainers, and coming attractions. Such stratagems
encouraged members to believe that they were part of a sophisti-
cated urban elite. Even James Bond became a member, as revealed
in Diamonds Are Forever. 51

Throughout, of course, the club highlighted images of beautiful
women and liberated sexuality. Its most notable feature became the
Bunnies, young women who served as waitresses and hostesses in
the various sections of the establishment. Chosen for their good looks
and vivacious personalities, they included models, working girls, and
a number of Playmates from Playboy. The Bunnies became a magnet
for hordes of men eager to see magazine images in the flesh. Their
attire did not disappoint. Originally, Hefner had wanted to present
the Bunnies in short nightgowns or modified undergarments. But
after discussion with Lownes, he decided to go with the rabbit theme.
A seamstress prepared a prototype Bunny outfit: a one-piece, satin,

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MR. PLAYBOY

swimsuit-style garment that was low-cut on top and steeply raised on
the sides to accentuate long legs. The later addition of bunny ears, a
fluffy bunny tail, and bow tie and cuffs completed the ensemble . 52

The Bunnies quickly emerged as key symbols in the diversifying
Playboy empire. The fourth floor of the Playboy Mansion was con-
verted into a dormitory where many of them found lodging while
also ornamenting the weekly parties. Hefners brother, Keith, joined
the organization to manage the female workforce. He developed an
extensive list of protocols in the Playboy Club Bunny Manual , invent-
ing the famous “bunny dip,” the unique maneuver whereby the wait-
ress faced away from the table, arched her back, bent her knees and
delivered drinks with a graceful arm motion. Bunnies were encour-
aged to project a healthy sexuality, much like the girl-next-door aura
of the Playmates, but were not allowed to see patrons after hours or
even give out their phone numbers. Hefner needed to be extraor-
dinarily careful to avoid any taint of sexual impropriety, and scandal
would quickly produce accusations of lewdness or even prostitution.
“If any of our girls date a customer, she gets fired,” Hefner told a
newspaper. “We’ve got to keep it that way or the whole thing could
come down around our ears .” 53

The Chicago Playboy Club was an immediate hit. Patrons lined up
around the block to get in, and within a year it had enrolled over fifty
thousand keyholders. Over the next few years the clubs would expand
into fifteen American cities and gain a membership of half a million.
Such popularity reflected the growing appeal of the Playboy lifestyle
to urban men, especially in such a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood
form. As Keith Hefner observed, the clubs represented “the excite-
ment of the pages of Playboy and ... let people get a glimpse of what
the fantasy world was really all about.” The Playboy Club, of course,
also magnified Hefner’s stature. Mr. Playboy featured prominently
in news stories about these popular nightspots which not only repre-
sented Playboys fantasy of the good life but extolled the celebrity of
the man who personified it . 54

But not all of Hefner’s efforts to promote himself as Mr. Playboy
were successful. His expansion of a lifestyle empire with him at the
center experienced two notable failures. Around the same time as
these other endeavors, he set in motion Show Business Illustrated , a
magazine devoted to entertainment. Covering films, theater, record-
ing, nightclub acts, television, and books as well as gossip reports on

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the comings and goings of the stars, the magazine reflected Hefners
long-standing fascination with Americas mass culture. “It will do
for show business what Time does for news and Sports Illustrated
for sports,” Hefner told the newspapers. He hired an editorial staff
from New York and published the first issue in September 1961. The
publication flopped almost immediately. A cluttered smorgasbord of
entertainment news, brief reviews of every production under the sun,
and sexy photos of beautiful women (but no nudes), the magazine
appeared encyclopedic but it had no personality, no editorial stance, no
special spark. After six months and only eight issues, he sold the mag-
azine to a competitor and absorbed a loss of $1.5 million. 55

A second failed project revealed much more about Hefners per-
sonality and aspirations. In 1961, he became involved in a venture
to make a Hollywood movie about his life and amazing success as
publisher of Playboy. He had become friends with the actor Tony
Curtis, and their conversations spawned the idea. Curtis was enthu-
siastic; Hefner was ecstatic. After preliminary negotiations, Playboy
announced the forthcoming movie in November 1961, and Variety
confirmed that Columbia Pictures would finance and release the film,
while Stanley Margulies would produce and Bernard Wolfe would
write the screenplay. Curtis spent a couple of weeks in Chicago hang-
ing around the magazine offices to observe Hefner in preparation for
the role. 56

It quickly became apparent, however, that the participants were
not on the same page. Curtis and the studio envisioned a light com-
edy about a guy with six girlfriends who constantly had to scramble in
organizing his life to avoid embarrassing conflicts. Hefner had more
serious themes in mind — Curtis sarcastically referred to the editors
desire for “Dostoevsky in the nude” — and began to bombard the actor,
writer, and producer with missives. Unused to the publishers massive
memos, they were stunned when thirty-pagers began to arrive at their
offices with disturbing regularity. They would explicate “the entire
Playboy Philosophy, which he wants to dramatize in a six-hour movie,
paragraph by paragraph,” said Curtis. “And I don’t even have to read
them, I just have to weigh them to know that we’re never, ever going
to make this movie.” 57

The memos spoke volumes about Hefner’s perception of himself.
He envisioned the film as a vehicle for a romanticized rendering of his
own life — the young man from modest circumstances who overcame

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MR. PLAYBOY

the odds, liberated American society from life-choking prudery, and
walked off into the sunset. Hefner outlined this triumphant fantasy,
with himself as the star, in a memo to Curtis:

It is the middle 1950s in Chicago, and a young man in his mid-
twenties, a rather down-at-the-heels Brooks Brothers type,
with button-down shirt frayed at the edges and buttons com-
ing loose on his overcoat, is working for $60 dollars a week for
a big, plush mens magazine. The young man is unhappy — but
he has wild dreams for the creation of a magazine for the
urban man. . . . [He successfully launches the publication and
a national do-good group says the magazine is obscene; the
Playmate of the Month is little better than a streetwalker. The
group sues and there is a dramatic trial.] We get a chance for
a wonderful court scene that has many of the emotional values
of the beautiful court ending in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,”
and a similar judicial-type climax set in the Washington Senate
in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” This climax offers all
the opportunities for the evils and hypocrisy of censorship,
prudery, and the bluenose view of life pitted against freedom,
youth, a notion that sex is beautiful rather than dirty. . . .
Through the stress and strain of it all, our hero has come to
his senses and realized that it is truly the little secretary that
he loves, and they wander out of that courtroom to live happily
ever after.

Hefner wanted to present to the public the film version of his life
that he had already created in his own imagination. He wanted to
make a movie about a movie running in his head. 58

Hefners associates in the film venture were unreceptive. They
plunged ahead with their own screenplay. Hefner disapproved. Two
new writers, Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, came aboard to rework it
and they turned in a revised version that Hefner also rejected, subse-
quently firing off several long memos promoting his version. In early
1963, a “final” draft of the screenplay appeared and production was
set to begin. Hefner again objected, claiming that he had been shoved
aside, and refused his approval. After several testy exchanges, the
publisher and the studio agreed that shooting should be postponed.
The project quietly faded away. 59

LIVING THE FANTASY

165

Despite the failure of the movie, Hefners larger transformation
into Mr. Playboy succeeded in creating a kind of fantasy fulfillment
at the dawn of the 1960s. By remaking himself into an ideal young
male sophisticate walking out of the pages of Playboy, he realized a
dream of what his life should be that had been slowly taking shape
since adolescence. But the public ramifications loomed even larger.
By publicizing his exploits he stimulated a fantasy among a large
audience that such a life was possible. Like a fictional British secret
agent, a gang of hip Hollywood entertainers, and a charismatic young
president, Hefner symbolized a growing desire among American
men to grab the good things in life — sex, material abundance, style,
success. In turn, this fed the desire of many women to grab on to
such men.

Hefner could not have been happier. As he wrote in a December
1961 letter, “What does it feel like, being a living legend? Well, it
feels just great!” 60

PART III

TRIUMPH

The Philosopher King

T he crisp black-and-white film showed a young man with dark
hair and an intense manner driving through the rainy streets of
Chicago in his sleek white Mercedes convertible. As he sped
along with windshield wipers clearing his vision and the vinyl top
protecting him from the elements, his words came out to listeners in
a voice-over. Noting that he was thirty-five years old and the creator
of a $20 million empire centered on Playboy magazine, the driver
exclaimed, “I wouldn’t trade places with anyone else in the world.”
He contended that people should work and play hard because “you
only get one time around in this old world, and if you don’t make the
most of it you have no one to blame but yourself.”

For the next twenty minutes, the film juxtaposed recurring images:
on the one hand, a bash at the Playboy Mansion with loud music,
sumptuous food, dancing revelers, and bikini-clad young women
cavorting in the indoor swimming pool; on the other, an inspection of
the Playboy offices, a survey of its publisher’s work routine, and brief
interviews with colleagues. Throughout, the young man offered his
views on liberated sexuality, the virtues of enlightened self-interest
and the good life, and his own role as the spokesman of a new, restless

169

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MR. PLAYBOY

generation. Radiating self-satisfaction, he concluded, “I consider
myself to be, quite possibly, the luckiest human being in the world.”

The Most, a 1961 documentary produced by a Canadian group,
won several awards for its flashy, slightly satirical treatment of Hugh
Hefner, the publishing sensation who had made Playboy an icon of
modern, youthful urban sophistication. The film seemed to capture
Hefners energy, focus, and sensibility while subtly suggesting in a
variety of ways — his girlfriend repeatedly struggling with the word
“intelligent” while being interviewed, several bored men dozing
at the mansion party — a vacuous element in the perfect life. But
Hefners enormous self-confidence left the most powerful impres-
sion. Appearing as someone who saw himself as the very embodiment
of the hip, swinging, trendy life in America, he proclaimed, “I have
come to be seen as emblematic of the 1960s.” 1

Not everyone was so impressed. “That man, strutting, preening,
posing, and spouting nonsense, is a new kind of animated cartoon, a
sort of mental Magoo,” said a venomous review in Newsweek. “The
prince of playmates lives in an unspeakably vulgar playhouse with a
swimming pool, and apparently, a perennial party.” But impressed or
not, people were paying attention. A spate of publicity in newspapers,
magazines, and television put Hefner firmly in the public spotlight
early in the 1960s. 2

Throughout these appearances, Hefner often elaborated his life-
style message of sexual pleasure, material abundance, dedication to
work, and enjoyment of leisure from the 1950s. But he also began
to turn his magazine in a new direction in the early 1960s, addressing
a number of controversial social, cultural, and political issues. Taking
himself and Playboy more seriously as an influence on American val-
ues, he began a lengthy, serial exposition of his worldview that raised
extended commentary from many corners, especially the religious
community. Ensconced in the comfort of the Playboy Mansion in
the early 1960s — indeed, withdrawing deep into its pleasurable
confines — the young editor became a kind of philosopher king.

With the success of Playboy, Playboys Penthouse, the Playboy
Mansion, and the Playboy Club serving as a springboard, Hefner
vaulted into the national limelight as major media outlets rushed

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171

to describe and assess his remarkable success. In this great glare of
publicity, debates about the significance and merit of his ideas flared
up as critics lined up to support or condemn. Hefner became the talk
of the country.

The big national magazines took the lead. Most often they com-
bined disdain for the Playboy enterprise with grudging recognition of
its popularity. In March 1961, Time ran a feature article that outlined
Hefners successes with his magazine, clubs, and licensed products,
while at the same time dismissing Playboy as sophomoric, “a sort
of editorial whee,” and its publisher as “a living promotion stunt.”
The Saturday Evening Post’s “Czar of the Bunny Empire” was even
harsher. This in-depth examination recognized Hefner’s growing leg-
end, but portrayed him as a fraud who traded on sleazy pictures of
naked women while proclaiming high-minded ideals, crafted a debo-
nair image to hide the social tastes of a rube, and projected a pub-
lic persona of charm and wit while privately engaging in querulous
outbursts of temper. Such stem disapproval, however, did not stop
the magazine from running full-page ads in the New Yorker and the
New York Times promoting its “Hef profile” of “Playboy’s boy wonder
of the publishing world.” 3

The Wall Street Journal offered a more detached analysis. It con-
cluded that a formula of sex and sophistication, producing a strong
identification with a young, growing audience, had created Hefners
$20 million empire. The New Yorker, in one of its famous cartoons,
offered another kind of affirmation. As a bride and groom stood at
the altar preparing to take their vows, and a pair of rabbit ears poked
up from the top of her veil, a seated guest turned to another and
remarked, “He met her in some Chicago key club, I understand.”
Smaller publications also joined the journalistic chase. Pageant, a
celebrity magazine, and the Realist, an offbeat journal of culture
and opinion, also profiled Hefner. His story gained an international
dimension as stories popped up in Italy’s L’Espresso and L’Europeo,
Germany’s ER, England’s Queen, and the Time magazine of South
America, Vision. 4

Another sign of Hefner’s prominence came in the send-ups of
Playboy that began to appear. The humorist Art Buchwald sur-
veyed the Bunny kingdom’s expansion in his nationally syndicated
column — “Some people are afraid that Hefner may try to take over
the United States, if not by force, at least by sex,” he wrote — while
Mad magazine presented a parody issue called Playkid. It featured

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MR. PLAYBOY

a “Hideaway Clubhouse for Little League Bachelors,” surveyed the
latest fashions in space helmets and baseball cards that “sophisti-
cated first through fourth graders will want to include on their after-
hours ‘must list’ for the school season,” and included a letter from a
future Playmate who described herself as having “golden hair, hazel
eyes, ruby-red lips, and sparkling silver braces on both my upper and
lower teeth.” Aardvark , the collegiate satire magazine, published
a fake Christian number titled Prayboy. Supposedly edited by
Hugh M . Holy, it contained a food feature called “One Part Bread,
Two Parts Wine,” a clothing piece titled “Black Is the Color of My
Preachers Suit,” and a pictorial on “The Girls of the Holy Land.” An
interview with “The Lord” — described as the star of the King James
Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost — had him telling the questioner,
“I know exactly what I’m going to say. In fact, I know exactly what
you’re going to ask.” 5

The Hefner media flurry also came on the airwaves. A variety of
documentaries, profiles, and interviews appeared in venues such as the
Canadian Broadcasting Company, NBC’s early morning Today show, a
CBS talk show in Chicago called At Random, The Jack Paar Show,
and Mike Wallace’s popular PM East, which included interviews with
Hefner, Spectorsky, and Lownes as well as taped footage from inside
the magazine’s offices. A comedic high point came on The Steve Allen
Show when a Playboy Bunny appeared in a skit where she trained the
host to serve in her job. As a mincing, wisecracking Allen donned
the rabbit ears, learned to walk correctly with an enticing stroll, and
practiced the “bunny dip,” the studio audience howled. 6

By the early 1960s, news of Playboy and its publisher was reach-
ing a vast new audience. Some treatments were hostile, but even
unfavorable publicity has its merits, as the showman P. T. Barnum
once observed. “Now and then some one would cry out humbug’ and
‘charlatan,’ but so much the better for me,” he wrote. “It helped to
advertise me, and I was willing to bear the reputation.” In fact, in this
flood of stories, the allure of the forbidden appeared to have a more
powerful appeal than righteous exhortations. In a modern culture
pulsating with messages of individual self-fulfillment, chastisements
of Playboy’ s licentiousness from stuffy cultural arbiters often had the
ironic effect of encouraging what they condemned. 7

At the center of this whirlwind of attention stood Hefner himself. In
stories and interviews he stressed the Upbeat Generation’s desire for

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upward mobility and leisure, the virtues of unfettered individualism,
and the need for a vigorous pleasure ethic in modern American life.
Playboy, he insisted, was the voice of a restless, aspiring new spirit
in the country that sought to embrace a life of abundance even as it
sidestepped demands for middle-class, suburban conformity. “Life is
a wonderful, exciting adventure, if we allow it to be. If we savor and
fully enjoy each day of it,” he typically declared in one of his television
appearances. “Trouble is, we too often defeat our own best chances
for finding real satisfaction and happiness in life. There is a great
tendency in our culture to live continually for tomorrow. And when
you do that, tomorrow has a way of never coming.” 8

Hefner advocated a code of robust sexuality. Reciting his by-
now familiar formulation, sex meant pretty girls, romantic nights on
the town, and physical and emotional joy. His magazine and the
Playboy Clubs urged the open embrace of wholesome sex rather than
conveying vulgar images of strippers, illicit liaisons, and shameful
vices. “The guy brings the dream with him — he supplies the most
important ingredient of all,” Hefner told a British journalist. “And the
majority of guys are not looking for the kind of action that breaks up
that dream. . . . Clean sex has a greater appeal than tawdry sex.” As he
summarized in a 1962 appearance, “Anything that makes sex seem
clean, healthy, desirable, and beautiful is good.” 9

But the familiar proselytizing contained a new element of self-
confidence that bordered on egotism. At various times, Mr. Playboy
described himself as “without doubt the most successful man I ever
met,” a “living legend,” and a modern F. Scott Fitzgerald who was
“typical of the present generation.” Perhaps his most breathtaking
comment came in The Most. Pondering his influence and achieve-
ments, he concluded, “Genius is kind of a funny word. I suppose by
definition I consider myself one — both intellectually and in terms of
creativity.” 10

Playboy’s growing prominence also triggered a backlash of nega-
tive criticism. “Is the American man emotionally retarded, a perpet-
ually snickering adolescent?” asked the conservative writer Russell
Kirk. “The abuse of sexual images and enticements is a symptom of
decadence in American life.” The Saturday Review derided Hefners
“bunny-tailed utopia” as “the country of arrested adolescence.”
Benjamin DeMott, a professor of English at Amherst, sneered at
Playboy’s “vision of the whole man reduced to his private parts.” 11

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MR. PLAYBOY

Such denunciations touched a nerve. Convinced that Playboy’s
critics were misrepresenting his views, Hefner decided to strike
back. He began to ponder more deeply what he saw as his mission in
American society. Inspired by the acclaim and fueled by the attacks,
he decided to explain the philosophy behind his enterprise.

In December 1962, readers of Playboy encountered a new editorial
series. The magazine’s rabbit head logo sat atop the tide, “The Playboy
Philosophy,” while below it sat the authors name: Hugh M. Hefner.
He noted that while his magazine had become the subject of much
recent discussion, its views and images had been distorted. He vowed
“to state our own editorial credo here, and offer a few personal obser-
vations on our present-day society and playboy’s part in it.” As he
observed in a private letter, “If playboy was to be either praised or
damned for what it represents and believes in, I would rather have
it for what we really do believe than what someone else says that we
believe.” 12

“The Playboy Philosophy” became the phrase that launched a
thousand pages. Originally intended as a fairly brief statement, the
project soon became an obsession and swelled beyond all proportion.
The author holed up in the Playboy Mansion, poring over dozens of
files filled with research material and staying up for days on end writ-
ing, and rewriting, endless drafts of his thoughts on an array of social,
cultural, political, legal, and sexual issues facing American society. By
the time it ground to a halt, Hefners “statement” had appeared in
twenty-five installments over a three-year period.

A genuine sincerity and idealism initially prompted this undertak-
ing. Convinced that mainstream American values needed to be exam-
ined and reformed, Hefner sought dialogue and debate. “It is simply
a pleasure — and a considerable one — to try to spell out one’s guiding
principles,” he told a correspondent. “I hope that we can offer some
ideas about moral responsibility, ethics, the importance of the indi-
vidual, the need for greater emphasis on . . . the humane side of life
that may start people thinking about some of those things.” 13

But then a kind of mania set in as Hefner turned creation of the
Playboy Philosophy into the journalistic version of the Bataan death

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march. Hidden away in his bedroom and writing for days without
sleep, he became afflicted with a growing compulsion to explore
every aspect, dig up every detail, and express every thought about
the social or sexual problem at hand. The essays ballooned. Working
at his bedroom desk on a Royal Standard typewriter, or perched atop
his round bed surrounded by piles of documents, the author con-
sulted elaborate files on birth control, womanization, the law and
obscenity, divorce, abortion, and a host of similar topics. Several
research assistants combed through books looking for relevant dis-
cussions and quotations. Hefner sent a stream of his infamous memos
demanding information on various topics ranging from the arcane to
the impossibly vast:

Please get me as much research as possible on earlier Catholic
attitudes on sex — the Church used to be very liberal in the
area of sex in earlier European days.

Will you please have a staff member gather for me a nice
list of famous men of history who, in addition to their other
accomplishments, were noted for their high degree of sexual
activity, either in or out of marriage?

Can we tie the Renaissance in with sexual freedom and
sexual vigor? If so, I would like some specifics not only in
terms of sexual freedom and sexual totalitarianism, but
also specific examples of what was accomplished in periods
like the Renaissance in Europe, and what failed to occur dur-
ing the Dark Ages and the Victorian period . 14

New associate editor Nat Lehrman, who had been assigned to
head the research staff, witnessed the process first hand. With an
irreverent sign saying “If Hef Likes It, It’s Art” tacked behind his
desk, the young journalist struggled to assist the publisher with
his essays. Hefner agonized over every word, once subjecting
Lehrman to a twenty-four-hour writing session where, near the end,
he considered verbs, alternately writing and crossing out “said,”
“stated, "“remarked,” and “observed.” An exhausted Lehrman mut-
tered each time, “Sounds good to me.” Linally Hefner said sharply,
“You’re not just trying to get out of here, are you?” Hefners haphazard
use of others’ work also caused problems. He was particularly taken
with two books — one titled Sex and the Law and the other Sex

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MR. PLAYBOY

and History — and quoted great chunks from them with little or no
attribution. Eventually, both authors grumbled about having their
work cribbed, but Lehrman headed off disaster by paying them in
lieu of a lawsuit for plagiarism . 15

Indeed, Hefners painstaking labors created exasperating prob-
lems for Playboy. Preoccupied with his wri t ing and locked away in his
mansion bedroom, the publisher neglected other important decision-
making with the magazine. His installments of the Philosophy often
arrived so late that they pushed the magazine over production dead-
lines, driving the editors to distraction. A. C. Spectorsky, upon whose
shoulders fell many of the difficulties, turned bitter, describing the
mansion as “the Bunker,” the philosophy as “a grinding, endless bore,”
and his own struggles as “the tortures of the damned.” According to
Theo Spectorsky, Hefner spent “two years repeating himself, work-
ing at a snails pace, fussing over every comma, weeks past dead-
line almost every month, squirreled away inside his quarters at the
Mansion, with Augie trying frantically to pry the word loose .” 16

What did this Herculean labor produce? Mostly, Hefner elaborated
themes he had been discussing for years in interviews — the liberated
individuals need to enjoy material abundance, economic opportunity,
leisure fulfillments, and sexual freedom; the emergence of a restless
Upbeat Generation eager for such things; Playboy’s mission to pro-
mote this agenda. All the while, he ransacked history for examples
and unloaded bushels of quotes from philosophers and social thinkers
to buttress his opinions.

The first few installments meandered through discussions of
American history and the cult of “the common man,” the influence
of religion on modern values, capitalism versus communism, the
history of sex in Western civilization, and disputes over obscenity,
pornography, and censorship. Then Hefner turned to even broader
questions of the competing claims of the individual and society, the
role of reason and self-interest, the historical evolution of religious
morality, and the history of sexual mores. During the concluding
installments of the Playboy Philosophy, the author, obviously running
out of steam, printed transcripts from four radio roundtables on “The
American Sexual Revolution” in which he had participated . 17

The final result was an enthusiastic, if rather pedestrian and unsys-
tematic, recycling of ideas common to modern humanist liberalism.
Hefner followed a well-trodden path in arguing that the good of the

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individual trumped most social considerations, worldly human affairs
were more important than the afterlife, and traditions or institutions
that unduly restricted individual expression should be dismantled.
An unusually strong libertarian position defending the pursuit of self-
interest, and an unusually daring emphasis on sexual freedom made
for the most novel features of his essays. The Hefner credo was part
John Stuart Mill, part Adam Smith, part Ayn Rand, and part popular
Freudianism.

If the content of Hefners essays was unremarkable, their style
could be exasperating. While his unadorned prose could be crisp
and illuminated with flashes of insight and passion, more often it was
turgid and repetitive. The Hefner style incorporated great chunks of
quotation (three pages verbatim of a description of Supreme Court
justice Hugo Black’s views on free speech) and presented generaliza-
tions that reached galactic proportions (“Modern American morality
is an amalgamation of the superstitious paganism and masochistic
asceticism of early Christianity; the sexual anxieties, feelings of guilt
and shame, witch-hunting sadism and sex repression of the medieval
Church; the desexualized courtly love of the troubadours; England’s
Romantic Age, wherein love was presumed to conquer all; and the
prohibitively strict, severe, joyless, authoritarian, unresponsive,
book-banning, pleasure-baiting dogma of Calvinist Protestantism,
Puritanism, and Victorianism.”). His consistent use of the “imperial
we” — “we’ve decided it’s time to speak out ourself [sic] on what we
believe in, and what we feel playboy represents in present-day
society” — quickly became annoying as it imparted a pretentious
quality to the essays. As Mort Sahl quipped, “Hef always wanted to
impress upon me that he was writing the Philosophy himself. Which
I had no doubts of after reading it.” 18

The Playboy Philosophy elicited widespread commentary. Playboy
readers offered much sympathetic appreciation, flooding the maga-
zine with letters supporting the publisher’s attempts to construct a
moral foundation for a modern lifestyle. They praised Hefner for
presenting life-affirming views that, in the words of one, discredited
the notion that “sex is evil, that pleasure is evil, that physical comfort
and the accumulation of wealth is evil.” Another reader character-
ized the Playboy Philosophy as “a 20th century version of Thomas
Paine’s Age of Reason.” A third saw in Hefner’s musings “the hunger
for a new philosophy as great as that which is inspiring the Sexual

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MR. PLAYBOY

Revolution itself.” Distinguished commentators also weighed in
affirmatively. Albert Ellis, writer on psychology and sexual morality,
praised Hefner for his “highly consequential and well-thought-out
views” while Ralph Ginzburg, the provocateur and editor of Eros,
offered congratulations on a weighty series that was “dealing the sin-
gle most significant blow to the forces of censorship of any publica-
tion in the history of the United States .” 19

Rut Hefners controversial views also inspired much denuncia-
tion. Some critics focused on what they saw as rampant hypocrisy
in the Playboy Philosophy, arguing that he was straining to create a
serious rationale for an enterprise obviously fueled by sex and profit.
A newspaper columnist asked, “I wonder what your circulation figures
would be if you were to eliminate some of the more arresting features
such as, say, the monthly Playmate, the Party Jokes page, the Ribald
Classic, the fashion studies and automobiles.” An essayist in the
Realist observed brutally that Hefner s theorizing could not obscure
the central appeal of his magazine, “namely, that Americans will pay a
lot of money to look at tits.” Playboy was really a monument to “clever
commercialism,” another critic noted, and Hefner s philosophy would
remain “semi-fraudulent” until he addressed that fact . 20

Other critics took a more philosophical bent. They argued that
Hefner s stress on individual self-fulfillment overlooked the need for
obligation and responsibility in society, while his stress on style and
possessions ignored the more important virtues of love, respect,
and soul. Reflecting “a certain emptiness that is the emptiness of
necessity,” wrote one critic, Hefner propounded “an empty material-
ism and cellophane hedonism.” Others excoriated his social ideal as
“a fairyland of distorted values” and his pleasure-seeking as “a form of
infantilism and narcissism.” Writing in the Antioch Review, an English
professor described the Playboy Philosophy as a compendium of half-
digested ideas, a sophomoric “hit-and-run gallop through psychology,
economics, morality, education, religion, and sociology .” 21

A long, thoughtful essay in a Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-
Times encapsulated many of these critical suspicions. “Runnies in a
Tinseled Thinksville” took Hefner to task for peddling a sunny vision
of life that ignored elements of pain and despair, without which there
could be no understanding of happiness. With sex, the author main-
tained, Hefner presented a false choice between stuffed-shirt prud-
ery and recreational seduction. “Could it be that neither approach

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suggested by Hefner is the healthy, the natural and the right one?”
he wrote. “Can a man be all for sex and all against Hefners brand of
sex?” Citing William Faulkners observation that a view of life that did
not take into account “love and honor and pity and pride and compas-
sion and sacrifice” was doomed, said the author, “it is interesting that
not one of them is discussed in the Playboy Philosophy.” 22

Many critics also found the Playboy Philosophy’s literary style off-
putting. The repetitive, bloated structure of the essays prompted the
complaint that Hefner “has succeeded quite admirably in compress-
ing a few ideas into many words.” Playboy ’ s old nemesis, Esquire,
awarded one of its 1963 Dubious Achievement Awards to Hefner
in the form of “a delicately fashioned, hand-embroidered sampler,
embellished with warm and homely symbols in each corner sur-
rounding these words: SHUT UP.” A scathing assessment in one
journal noted mathematicians’ contention that if you place a monkey
in front of a typewriter and give him an infinite amount of paper
and time, sooner or later he will accidentally type out Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. “A comic we know has a time-saving suggestion: get an
infinite number of monkeys to do the job instantaneously,” it contin-
ued. “Now we find that an infinite number of monkeys do exist and
that they are employed as researchers by Hugh M. Hefner, editor of
Playboy magazine.” 23

Hefner responded to such attacks with typical seriousness. He
established the Playboy Forum as a new venue in Playboy to dis-
cuss issues raised by both critics and defenders. It made its debut in
July 1963 and soon was filled with supportive letters from readers,
along with responses from Hefner. In the spring of 1965, because
of interest expressed by many college students and faculty, Hefner
went on a campus speaking tour to defend his philosophical specula-
tions. He appeared to packed auditoriums at Cornell, Johns Hopkins,
Northwestern, and the University of North Carolina to discuss the
Playboy Philosophy, usually in a panel-discussion format that included
local professors, writers, and moralists. Finally, in 1965 Hefner
founded the Playboy Foundation, a nonprofit agency that became an
activist arm of the Playboy Philosophy. Involving itself in several land-
mark endeavors — freeing a West Virginia man who had been impris-
oned for having oral sex, funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars
to the Kinsey Institute and Masters and Johnson for sex research,
assisting with the Roe v. Wade case that established women’s abortion

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MR. PLAYBOY

rights — the foundation proved that Hefner s philosophy was more
than mere rhetoric: it was a heartfelt manifesto of social reform. 24

Meanwhile, Hefner engaged in an extended battle of wits with a
powerful enemy: the American religious community. The Playboy
Philosophy had fingered Christianity as the source of most modem
emotional and social woes, and many religious spokesmen responded
in kind. The resulting debate between Playboy and the preachers
provided a glimpse of the cultural ferment beginning to bubble in
1960s America.

Ill

In the first installment of the Playboy Philosophy, Hefner focused
attention on two religious writers: Harvey Cox, the famous theo-
logian and author, who had denounced the magazine s advocacy of
“recreational sex” in Christianity and Crisis ; and the Reverend Roy
Larson, who accused Playboy of misleading young men in defining
their goals, character, and values in the Methodist magazine Motive.
When Hefner ended the series over two years later, he did so with
several radio roundtables featuring himself, a priest, a minister, and
a rabbi. This persistent engagement with religious figures made clear
that the publisher s ideas about religion lay at the heart of both his
formulations and the resulting controversy. 25

Indeed, the Playboy editor minced few words in identifying
Christianity as the bogeyman in the evolution of stultifying moral
codes in Western civilization. The Playboy Philosophy blamed
both Catholicism and Protestantism for nurturing repressive, restric-
tive, hypocritical attitudes that had denied physical needs and stunted
emotional health. Hefner contended that Christianity, while some-
times engendering sympathy, understanding, and charity, more often
had inspired “bloody wars,” kept millions “in abject poverty,” and
promoted “the tyranny of man over his fellow man.” This indictment
of Christianity reflected Playboy’s twin preoccupations — sex and
material abundance. 26

Christian doctrine, Hefner argued, had cultivated a prejudice
against material accumulation and prosperity by opposing worldly
things — possessions, money, success — to the ultimate goal of salvation.
Since Christianity taught that poverty was holier than wealth, the

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pauper was more likely to receive Gods grace than the prosperous
man. Such doctrines may have been compelling in an earlier age of
material want, Hefner argued, but “they make very little sense in
America today, however, where every man had ample opportunity to
better himself .” 27

Moreover, Hefner contended, Christianity had nurtured a poison-
ous hostility to human sexuality. Its roots lay in a dualistic paradigm
that posed the body and flesh as evil, and spirit and soul as virtuous.
From the time of Saint Paul onward, sex was seen as a sinful bodily
activity tolerated only for procreation. “By associating sex with sin, we
have produced a society so guilt-ridden that it is almost impossible to
view the subject objectively,” he noted of Christian culture . 28

The Christian abhorrence of sinful flesh, Hefner continued, pro-
duced something even worse — repression and censorship. Since
bodily temptation could not be transcended, the church sought to
regulate it with elaborate moral codes. Medieval Catholicism had
been stringent, but it was Calvinism, according to the Playboy pub-
lisher, that turned repression into an art form in America. It first
clamped down on pleasure-seekers in the colonial era, and then
persisted as a repressive force throughout American history. This
Puritan heritage, Hefner believed, had created a monstrous alliance
with the state to create anti-pleasure outrages such as blue laws,
anti-evolution statutes, and Prohibition. Sex became a special tar-
get as Christian zealots imposed severe legal restrictions on fornica-
tion, cohabitation, adultery, and sodomy, as well as erotic literature,
divorce, abortion, and birth control. In his view, it was “in our laws
related to sex that we find the greatest church-state intrusion upon
our personal freedom .” 29

Ultimately, Hefner confronted religion in the name of reason.
A humanist and rationalist, he disdained what he saw as the blind faith
and superstition driving Christian doctrine. “We believe in a moral and
law-abiding society,” he noted at one point in the Philosophy, “but one
in which the morality and the laws are based upon logic and reason
rather than mysticism or religious dogma.” Sexuality provided a telling
example. Irrationally insisting that sexual activity be strictly limited
to marriage, he contended, the church overlooked the obvious sexual
desires and needs of unmarried people. By simply saying that “sex for
all these people is wrong, is taboo, in truth, religion has not satisfac-
torily come to grips with the problem as it exists,” he wrote . 30

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MR. PLAYBOY

Christianity, in Hefner’s worldview, ran counter to the American
Way of Life with its values of democracy, self-reliance, and success-
seeking. As he argued passionately in the Playboy Philosophy,

Religion is based upon faith; democracy is based upon reason.
Americas religious heritage stresses selflessness, subservience
to a greater Power and the paying of homage to Him in long-
established, well-defined, well-organized ways; democracy
teaches the importance of self, a belief in oneself and ones
own abilities. Religion teaches that man should live for others;
our democracy’s free enterprise system is based on the belief
that the greatest good comes from men competing with one
another. . . .

Most organized religion in the U.S. is rooted in a tradition
that links man’s body with evil, physical pleasures with sin and
pits man’s mind and soul against the devils of the flesh; the
principles underlying our democracy recognize no such con-
flict of body, mind, and soul. 31

In part, Hefner’s animus toward Christianity flowed from a rejec-
tion of his religious upbringing. As an adolescent, he had become
disenchanted with his parents’ beliefs and “I’m still reacting,” he con-
fessed in an interview. Rut his broadsides also reflected a broader
ferment in American Christianity as the 1960s unfolded. In a growing
leisure culture of abundance since World War II, growing numbers of
mainstream Protestants and Catholics began to question traditional
religious strictures against material and sexual pleasure. Moreover, a
dissenting sensibility associated with the civil rights movement and
progressive politics created pressures in behalf of social activism
within churches. The result was a swelling crisis as many believers
began to question the relevance of traditional Christian values for
modern society. Such controversy culminated in the dissident “God
is Dead” movement at mid-decade. Amid this turmoil, powerful
defenders of Christianity marshaled their forces and lashed out at
critics. 32

Hefner became a key target. In the early 1960s, Christian tra-
ditionalists attacked the Playboy Philosophy in such numbers that
an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, titled “Playboy and
the Preachers,” concluded, “If Playboy has not exactly discovered

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183

religion, religion has discovered Playboy.” Some religious critics
simply blasted Hefner as a purveyor of “barnyard morality,” but
others proceeded more thoughtfully. 33

They took the Playboy publisher to task for a superficial under-
standing of theology. They complained that he failed to grasp the
influence of Neoplatonism in medieval Christianity and seemed
totally unaware of Martin Luther’s “earthy appraisal of man’s sexual
nature.” He failed to appreciate that the New Testament affirmed that
“life in the flesh” was good, even delightful as long as sex took place
within the institution of marriage. But critics were most distressed by
Hefner’s treatment of Puritanism. They contended, often heatedly,
that since American Christianity had jettisoned Puritan ideas in all of
the mainstream denominations by the early 1800s, Hefner was tilting
at theological windmills. The publisher, concluded one writer, was
“willing to tell the religious tradition of the West to go to hell, even
though he badly misunderstands that tradition.” 34

In fact, some traditionalists contended that Hefner had attempted
to create a “substitute religion” for his young, urban audience: Playboy
served as its Bible, the bunny logo as its sacred symbol, the Playboy
Clubs as its “sacred temples,” and the Bunnies as its “priestesses.”
Playboy even had a Lord’s Prayer, said one critic:

Our Fathers, who art in Madison Avenue and Ohio Street,
hallowed be thy names. May Thy work and influence flourish,
and may Thy will be done, in Peoria as well as in Manhattan.

Give us this day our daily Martini — dry and smooth — and
forgive us our goofs, even as we try to overlook the goofs of
others. And, for heaven’s sake, our Lords, take us into tempta-
tion and deliver us from the Puritans.

For thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory — if
not forever, at least until someone sharper than you comes
along. Amen and Amen. 35

Hefner’s secular religion, according to its opponents, promoted a
frivolous hedonism. Clerics contended that pleasure and recreation
were the only good in the Playboy moral universe. Sex served as
a form of entertainment and women became merely “the grandest
of all consumer goods.” As a chaplain summarized in the Catholic
World , the Playboy Philosophy represented “the elevation of the flesh

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MR. PLAYBOY

and the material to the level of the end in itself — a contemporary
idolatry.” 36

The Playboy Philosophy also dehumanized people, according to
many religious critics. By worshiping materialism and the body while
ignoring matters of the spirit and soul, Hefner reduced people to
less than fully human. Moreover, his philosophy isolated the indi-
vidual and weakened the possibility of genuine, meaningful relation-
ships with others. Real sex, one essayist argued, reflected a yearning
for emotional connection combining “eros (which loves the worth
of the other person) and agape (which loves the ‘authentic being’ of
the other person).” Hefner’s view of sex, to the contrary, reflected
only a sterile, selfish individualism, fueled by bodily desires, that was
unable to make a broader human connection. As one critic inquired
pointedly, “Is it not curious that a magazine so interested in sex is
singularly silent on the family?” 37

Other religious commentators rushed to Hefner’s defense. About
half of the clergymen who wrote in to the Playboy Forum supported
the Playboy Philosophy, with a significant portion being Unitarian
ministers, a small, liberal denomination. A Methodist college chap-
lain exclaimed, “The position you take is more authentically Christian
than much that is heard from pulpits today.” A Pittsburgh Theological
Seminary professor proposed that Hefner endow a Playboy Chair of
American Church History and noted, “I would be delighted beyond
measure to occupy such a chair.” A minister praised the publisher
from his pulpit in 1964, arguing that he had “dared to question the
life-denying philosophies” of the Western tradition. In his view,
the Playboy Philosophy had converged with a “liberal religious ideal”
to affirm that “the chief end of life is to glory man and enjoy him
forever.” 38

The religious reactions, both positive and negative, thrilled
Hefner. He concluded that he was being taken seriously, noting that
his essays had provided “a catalyst for a new discussion and exami-
nation of American social and sexual mores” that involved “newly
acquired theological, philosophical, medical, psychological, and soci-
ological insights.” He also took action. He offered steep discounts
to any clergymen who subscribed to Playboy. He also sent Anson
Mount to study at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Sewanee,
Tennessee. Mount emerged as an official spokesman in a long series of

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185

public appearances where he defended the theological implications
of the Playboy Philosophy. 39

By the mid-1960s, religious hostility to Hefner and his Playboy
Philosophy began to wane as a growing tide of social activism pushed
liberal Protestantism in his direction. A 1964 radio roundtable in
New York City, for instance, emerged as an exercise in searching
for common ground. Three local clerics — Father Norman O’Connor;
Reverend Richard Gary, an Episcopal minister; and Rabbi Marc
Tannenbaum — joined Hefner for a discussion of religious morality
and premarital sex, adultery, and birth control. A delighted Hefner
celebrated their lack of moral certainty. “Whatever difficulty each
of you may have had in delineating an absolute sex standard or
code of conduct for your respective religions is a positive reflection,
I think, of the soul-searching and re-evaluation taking place within
both religious and secular society,” he declared. 40

The pages of Playboy reflected this rapprochement with liberal
Christianity. In 1966, the Reverend William Hamilton contributed
an article on “The Death of God” that acclaimed this liberating event
for empowering humans to solve their own problems, based on the
example of Jesus of Nazareth. The following year, the magazine con-
vened “The Playboy Panel: Religion and the New Morality,” which
brought together a distinguished group of progressive clergy. They
ranged widely over the contemporary landscape, agreeing that mod-
em life demanded a reformulation of religious morality to include
situational ethics and greater latitude for sexual expression. 41

Harvey Cox, however, perhaps best represented liberal Christianity
and its accommodation with Playboy in the 1960s. An early critic of
the magazine with his influential 1961 essay, “Playboys Doctrine
of Male,” by 1967 he appeared in the conciliatory Playboy Panel.
Meanwhile, he had become a sparring partner for Hefner at several
public forums. In an appearance at Cornell, he noted that he had
become a fan of the magazine because of its committed engagement
with moral questions in recent years. Cox became a contributor to
Playboy, penning an article on the “Revolt in the Church,” which
insisted “that theological doctrines and religious forms we have
inherited from the past have reached the end of their usefulness,”
and “For Christ’s Sake,” which urged Christians to embrace “the
revolutionary portent of Jesus.” 42

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MR. PLAYBOY

Hefner s “Playboy Philosophy” and his extended encounter with
the tribunes of American Christianity denoted a serious new role
for the upstart publisher and his magazine in the 1960s. No longer
just a venue offering entertainment for men or a tour guide for jaunts
through Americas leisure culture, it was becoming a journalistic seis-
mograph measuring deeper rumblings beginning to shake the cul-
tural foundations of postwar America. Within a short time, as Playboy
confronted a host of social and political issues, that seismographic
needle would swing full tilt.

The Happiness
Explosion

T he prose was alternately elegant and jarring, the tone slightly
surreal, the punctuation wild and swirling, the phrases cracking
like staccato rimshots. Tom Wolfe, avatar of the “New Journalism,”
had come to Chicago in 1965 to explore the singular world of Hugh
Hefner. He spent time at the Playboy Mansion observing the editor
in his bedroom headquarters, trying to capture the essence of one of
the blazing new symbols of what he called “The New Life Out There”
in modern America. He published the result in the Sunday magazine
of the New York Herald Tribune.

According to Wolfe, Americans had chased wealth and social
advancement for generations before jettisoning the old status games
in the economic boom of the 1950s and early 1960s. “They’re using
a combination of Americas great postwar mass luxuries — time,
money, and technology,” he wrote, “to create avant-garde styles of
living that make New York’s culturati and fashionati look like leftovers
from a 19th-century Rumanian card dance.” They had turned their

187

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MR. PLAYBOY

households into consumer havens and created “discreet and rather
marvelous electronic worlds.” 1

Hugh Hefner exemplified this new lifestyle. Perched on an enor-
mous, revolving bed and dressed in pajamas, slippers, and robe, he
kept at his fingertips dozens of dials and switches to move the bed,
operate the television, adjust the hi-fi, dim the lights, and manage the
videotaping system. According to Wolfe:

Hefners genius has been to drop out of the orthodox status
competition and to use money and technology and to convert
his habitat into a stage and to get on the stage, not in the spec-
tator seats, and to be the undisputed hero himself. Through
the more and more sophisticated use of machines, Hefner,
and to a lesser degree millions of . . . homemakers outside of
New York have turned their homes into wonderlands, almost
complete status spheres all their own. . . .

What Hefner has been offering is not merely a fantasy of
some kind of potentate s serving of sex but also a fantasy of a
potentate s control of the environment — all of a sudden made
possible by the new lumpen middle-class style of life.

As a new kind of royalty — Wolfe dubbed him the “King of the
Status Drop-Outs,” the “Consumer King” — Hefner represented a
new kind of American. Rejecting many traditional norms of behav-
ior and mobilizing affluence to pursue personal contentment and
gratification, he, like many of his fellow citizens, had detonated a
“Happiness Explosion.” 2

Many others agreed that Hefner represented a mutinous spirit
arising in America. He had lured Americans to “enjoy what they have
always frowned upon: hedonism . . . unmarried sex . . . and suave
pseudo-intellectualism,” said Life. Look disapprovingly quoted his
declaration that publishing Playboy was like “waving a flag of free-
dom, like screaming ‘rebellion’ under a dictatorship.” The cultural
critic Malcolm Muggeridge concluded that Hefner sought “the
abandonment of the Judeo- Christian view of sex.” In other words,
the Playboy publisher increasingly appeared as not just a purveyor
of illicit pictures, but as a social subversive. 3

Hefner s evolving image was an early sign of a larger discontent in
American society. A spirit of rebellion was growing by the mid-1960s that

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189

combined impatience with traditional restraints, disapproval of long-
standing hierarchies, and desires for personal fulfillment. According to
the historian David Farber, Americas restless affluence had brought
the belief that “the old rules of scarcity and traditional values of thrift
and delayed gratification no longer held. . . . Cultural authority — the
power to set the rules of proper conduct and behavior — was up for
grabs.” A cultural cauldron of ferment had begun to bubble in 1960s
America, and no one seemed to know whether the end result would
be intoxicating, explosive, or both. Hefner didn’t know either, but he
sensed that Playboy would be in the thick of the action. 4

Throughout the early 1960s, Playboy continued addressing familiar
concerns with sex, consumption, and entertainment. Erotic themes,
of course, remained front and center stage as readers encountered
many old standbys — the Playmate of the Month, the Ribald Classic,
Playboy’s Party Jokes, the Vargas Girls drawings. Special features
included “The Girls of New York,” “The Girls of the Riviera,”
and, as the magazine’s contribution to Cold War thaw, “The Girls
of Russia.” “A Toast to Rikinis” showcased the female form, as did
celebrity pictorials on “The Nudest Jayne Mansfield” and “Rrigitte
Rardot: The Sex Kitten Grows Up.” The adult cartoon strip Little
Annie Fanny debuted in October 1962, while “Sex in the Cinema,” a
yearly roundup of erotic vignettes from the movies compiled by the
film critics Arthur Knight and Hollis Alpert, began in April 1965.

In similar fashion, the magazine continued its advocacy of refined
consumption and stylish living. Instructional articles on French cook-
ing, stereo equipment, and purchasing modem art appeared alongside
old favorites such as “Attire” by Robert L. Green, “Food” by Thomas
Mario, and “Man at His Feisure,” by FeRoy Neiman. A new feature
in 1960, “The Playboy Advisor,” promised to “answer your questions
on a wide variety of topics of interest to the urban man — from fash-
ion, food and drink, hi-fi and sports cars to dating dilemmas, taste
and etiquette.” Playboy’s advertisements, as they had done for years,
enhanced the fantasy of bountiful modern living, as ads for Rallantine
scotch, Wembley ties, Renauld sunglasses, Kaywoodie pipes, and
Munsingwear pajamas and robes adorned the magazine. 5

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MR. PLAYBOY

On the entertainment front, “Playboy After Hours” continued
previewing movies, plays, and music while pieces on figures such
as Tony Curtis, Elizabeth Taylor, and Richard Burton kept readers
abreast of the hottest celebrities. “On the Scene” focused on new,
young entertainers and artists such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Stanley
Kubrick, and Bob Dylan. The “Pigskin Preview” and the “Playboy
Jazz Poll” remained popular annual features. The October 1963 issue
began the serialization of Lenny Bruce s controversial autobiography,
How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.

Playboy enhanced its literary reputation for short fiction through-
out the early 1960s. Old friends Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury,
Charles Beaumont, and Ken Purdy were joined by younger writers
such as Bruce Jay Friedman, Irwin Shaw, Philip Roth, and John le
Carre. Pieces by prominent artists and authors such as Henry Miller,
Pablo Picasso, and Bertrand Russell also graced the magazine s pages,
while provocative cultural criticism came from the likes of Alfred
Kazin and Leslie Fielder. 6

But Playboy’s traditional formula also expanded significantly from
1960 tol965. “The Playboy Panel,” inaugurated in November 1960,
presented a venue for debating controversial public issues. Under its
auspices, Ralph Ginzburg, Norman Mailer, and Otto Preminger pon-
dered “Sex and Censorship in Literature and the Arts,” while Marquis
Childs, Senator Jacob Javits, and Vance Packard traded views on
“Business Ethics and Morality.” 7

The famous “Playboy Interview,” which debuted in September
1962, used a lengthy question-and-answer format to attract not only
entertainers — Miles Davis, Billy Wilder, Frank Sinatra, Richard
Burton — but figures in politics, arts and letters, journalism, and phi-
losophy. Indian head of state Jawaharlal Nehru, philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre, labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, and pop sensations the Beatles all
became subjects. “The Playboy Forum,” a new feature created in July
1963 to encourage debate over Hefner s serialized Playboy Philosophy,
underlined Playboy’s growing engagement with contemporary social
issues. 8

The magazine s growth spearheaded a larger expansion of the
company. A second Playboy Club opened in Miami, a third in New
Orleans, and by 1965 additional venues had appeared in Phoenix,
New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston,
Atlanta, and Kansas City. A minor disruption came when Victor

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191

Lownes departed the company in late summer 1962 after clashing
with Keith Hefner, who had assumed a managerial position with the
Playboy Clubs. The volatile Lownes, ever jealous of his favored posi-
tion, went after Hefner s younger brother. After a particularly rancor-
ous tirade accusing Keith of mismanagement, the older brother put
his foot down. “You know, Victor,” he said, “if you have nothing else
to do with your time but do this kind of horseshit, you must not be
doing your job.” Not long after that, Lownes resigned. 9

The New York club sounded the only sour note. A city commis-
sion, headed by a devout Catholic, refused to grant a cabaret license
because of scantily clad waitresses. After an appeal, a state Supreme
Court judge ordered the issuing of the license, observing that “it is
not incumbent upon the petitioner to dress its female employees in
middy blouses, gymnasium bloomers, turtleneck sweaters, fishermans
hip boots, or ankle-length overcoats” to satisfy the commissioners
personal moral code. A few months later, Life magazine broke a story
exposing the New York State Liquor Authority for engineering shake-
downs and payoffs from bars, clubs, and liquor stores. It emerged that
the Playboy Club had been forced to pay a tribute of some $79,000
to get a liquor license. Hefner issued a statement explaining that his
company had paid out of necessity, but then subsequently exposed
the wrongdoing to the district attorney and a grand jury. In a trial on
corruption charges brought against several state officials, Playboy was
vindicated as being the victim of extortion and blackmail. The club
had a gala opening on December 8, 1962. 10

Other Playboy projects flourished. Playboy Tours offered vacation
packages while The Playboy Gourmet appeared as a handbook for food
and drink. The bunny logo emblazoned a long list of items: jewelry,
clothing, calendars, bar accoutrements, keychains, lighters, and golf
equipment. The Bedside Playboy collected the best articles and stories
from the magazine, while the LeRoy Neiman Portfolio and the Alberto
Vargas Portfolio presented a collection of the artists’ drawings from
the magazine. On September 28, 1964, the Playboy Theatre opened
in Chicago after a complete refurbishing of the old Surf Theater. The
following spring, Hefner purchased the lease on the famous Palmolive
Building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for $2.7 million. After exten-
sive renovation, Playboy occupied about 25 percent of the thirty-seven-
floor building, rechristened it the Playboy Building, and made the
huge beacon that swept out over the city from atop it the magazine s

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MR. PLAYBOY

calling card. A few months later, Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex
and the Single Girl , reshaped Cosmopolitan into a female version of
Playboy , n

Hefner s synergistically expanding empire produced soaring prof-
its. The 1964 annual report indicated that magazine sales had reached
$2.4 million and were expected to reach $3 million by early 1965.
Advertising sales climbed dramatically as Playboy roped in new main-
stream clients such as Goodyear Tires, Falstaff Brewing, Admiral TV,
Faberge, and Schick Razors. Total sales from magazine circulation,
advertising, and subsidiary products totaled nearly $21 million; from
the Playboy Clubs over $12 million; and from Playboy products a bit
over $1 million. This represented an increase of 43 percent over the
previous year. 12

Hefner maintained his position atop Playboy’s hierarchy. As pub-
lisher, editor, and guiding light, he controlled everything about the
magazine, from editorial policies to visual images to every aspect of
the operation. Nothing about Playboy escaped his attention, and a
barrage of lengthy memos disclosed a perfectionism bordering on
compulsion.

Hefner initiated the Playboy Advisor in 1960 with a full set of
instructions on how to formulate answers to problems of dating, din-
ing, and dressing. He rode herd on the column, critiquing both the
answers (they often required more punch and color) and the editing
of the letters (a pathetic overtone often needed to be scrubbed). He
also monitored special projects such as the “Playboy Pads” series and
“Sex in Cinema” series. 13

Hefner regularly tackled visual issues in the magazine. In a long
1962 missive on Playmate photos, he instructed that the reader should
“feel as though he really knows the girl — he understands something
about her inner thoughts, her hopes and dreams, her fears, and her
aspirations.” Around the same time, he composed a nineteen-page,
single-spaced critique of the graphics and design of the previous
years magazine. Proceeding issue by issue, picture by picture, draw-
ing by drawing, he analyzed in incredible detail every image that a
reader had seen and suggested improvements. 14

Hefners attention extended into all areas of the Playboy empire
as well. He kept an eye on the management of the Playboy Clubs and
personally approved every piece of Playboy merchandise and every
Playboy Books project. Even minor undertakings like the Playmate

THE HAPPINESS EXPLOSION

193

Calendar prompted him to chastise the photo and art departments
for failing to work more cohesively and carefully. 15

The tiniest detail drew his attention. One memo dictated that “for
all receptionists, on all floors, in all of the Playboy Buildings, abso-
lutely no gum chewing is to be allowed during the working day while
they are at their desks.” Another instructed that two suits of armor
at the Playboy Mansion needed to be cleaned and remounted, while
“some chain mail for the front pelvic area should be placed on the
older suit in place of the velvet skirt that is now on it.” He went
through every bedroom and apartment in the mansion providing
directions on how each should be set up in terms of decor, furniture,
painting, towels and washcloths, ashtrays, keys, and rental fees. 16

Under Hefners leadership, Playboy grew bigger, more influential,
and more profitable in the early 1960s. In so doing it relied upon
many familiar elements to provide “entertainment for men,” but it
also began to modify its traditional agenda in significant ways. Few
would have predicted it in earlier years, but the publisher slowly
entered the world of public affairs.

As the new decade unfolded, Hefner, in his words, decided that if
the magazine was to grow “then we should be paying attention to
major social issues that were keeping a good number of people from
enjoying the life we were espousing in the rest of the magazine.” The
Playboy Philosophy reflected this new concern with matters more
weighty than techniques of seduction, dining etiquette, and the lat-
est cut of evening wear. But Hefner and his magazine also caught a
larger liberationist spirit that was blowing through America in the
early 1960s and shaking the shutters of tradition. The magazine began
to promote a liberal activism that advocated not a radical overhaul
of the socioeconomic system, but breaking down barriers to provide
greater, freer access to it. Playboy’s positions represented an official
counterculture of the enlightened, sophisticated, and affluent. 17

The arrival of several new, youthful editors helped sharpen
Playboy’s new profile. In the early 1960s, Spectorsky hired Sheldon
Wax, Murray Fisher, and Nat Lehrman to bring fresh perspectives
and energy to the magazine. They reinforced its new social and

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MR. PLAYBOY

political sensibility and influenced its liberal bent. “We were doing
very interesting things, particularly in the sexual area and in the civil
liberties and civil rights area in the early Sixties,” Lehrman recalled
later. “There were things happening, ideas were opening up. Playboy
was always a step ahead of those ideas.” 18

New kinds of articles began to appear. Paul Goodman wrote a
scathing critique of the nations school system and J. Paul Getty
penned a series of articles on business; both agreed that the quest for
economic security had created a conformity that was choking initia-
tive and creativity in America. In “The Age of Overbreed,” Sir Julian
Huxley warned that population growth was threatening to overwhelm
both physical resources and social structures around the globe. 19

In cultural affairs, Terry Southern, the controversial author and
playwright, contended that movies had supplanted the novel because
of their superior sensory capabilities and willingness to tackle contem-
porary problems. The burgeoning drug culture attracted attention.
Dan Wakefield examined the history of marijuana use, suggesting its
virtues as well as vices, while Richard Carter explored Americans’ love
affair with pharmaceuticals — pills, potions, capsules, ointments — as
the pathway to perfection in body and spirit. 20

Playboy turned its attention to politics. In 1963, William F. Buckley
and Norman Mailer jousted over “The Role of the Right Wing in
America Today.” Buckley defended conservatives’ perception of
unraveling moral values and a willingness to coddle communist
authoritarianism in mainstream society while Mailer characterized
conservatism as little more than a “contradictory stew of reactionar-
ies and individualists, of fascists and libertarians.” In “The Liberal
Dilemma,” the noted commentator Marquis Childs argued that
modem progressives needed to venture beyond the comfortable con-
fines of the New Deal tradition in addressing modem problems. 21

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Playboy s heightened social
awareness came in the area of race relations. Hefner’s longtime sup-
port for racial equality and the civil rights movement laid the ground-
work. In his television show, Playboy’s Penthouse, he had insisted on
booking black acts and mixing white and black guests. Conversing
on the air with the Gateway Singers, a music group with three white
men and a black woman, he discussed their inability to get network
bookings because of the racial mix. When several southern televi-
sion stations refused to carry the show, Victor Lownes told the press,

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195

“Hefner and I aren’t going to back down on this issue. Television can
be a great force in ending discriminatory nonsense. . . . Most of the
complaining letters we get about it are from idiots.” 22

In the early 1960s, Hefner supported Sammy Davis Jr.’s contro-
versial marriage to May Britt, a white woman. He attended a benefit
for Martin Luther King Jr. in New York City and made a significant
contribution. With the launching of the Playboy Clubs, Hefner put a
firm policy of racial integration into place. Black keyholders were
welcome and black comedians such as Dick Gregory, George Kirby,
Slappy White, and Flip Wilson were booked regularly. Controversy
flared in 1961 over the admission of blacks to the newly opened New
Orleans club. An article in the Village Voice exposed the fact that
the nightclub, which had been franchised to local owners, was refus-
ing admission to African Americans. Hefner fired off a long letter to
the editor explaining that Playboy was “a liberal organization that is
being forced to comply with a local situation” in New Orleans. He
reassured that all efforts were being made to integrate the club as
soon as possible. Indeed, within a short time the parent company had
repurchased the New Orleans club, as well as the Miami club, from
the franchise holders and put integrated policies into place. 23

African Americans, especially in Chicago, voiced their apprecia-
tion. Articles in the black press praised Playboy ’ s nondiscriminatory
hiring policies and quoted Hefner: “I personally accept other human
beings, in both my personal and business world, on the basis of indi-
vidual merit and without regard to their race, color, nationality, or reli-
gion.” In 1962 Hefner received the “Brotherhood Award” from one
Chicago group and the “Good American Award” from another for his
commitment to “the fundamental right of equality of opportunity in
employment without regard to color, creed, sex, or national origin.” 24
Hefner’s relationship with Dick Gregory, the controversial black
comedian, exemplified his racial stance. The Chicago Playboy Club
hired Gregory, then an unknown local comedian, to do a show in 1961
and he quickly became a favorite with his irreverent routine focusing
on American racial tensions. “Segregation isn’t all bad,” he would say.
“Have you ever heard of a wreck where the people on the back of the
bus got hurt?” Or, “I wouldn’t mind paying taxes if I knew they were
going to a friendly country.” Hefner remained a friend and supporter
when the comedian became an outspoken civil rights activist, and
wrote the introduction for Gregory’s book From the Back of the Bus

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MR. PLAYBOY

(1962). In the summer of 1964, Hefner even “guaranteed” a $25,000
reward offered by Gregory for information leading to the discovery
of three missing civil rights workers in Mississippi. 25

Hefners civil rights stance was replicated in Playboy in the early
1960s. He encouraged staffers to solicit African American Playmates.
“If a girl is really beautiful, I think she ought to prove popular with
our readers, whatever her race,” he wrote. The first black Playmate,
Jennifer Jackson, appeared in March 1965. Playboy Interviews with
prominent figures on the civil rights scene such as Gregory, King, and
Cassius Clay appeared. 26

The most dramatic Playboy interviews came with two figures
standing as ideological bookends on the race issue. In May 1963,
Malcolm X aired his militant message of black separatism, declar-
ing, “I don’t know when Armageddon is supposed to be. But I do
know that the time is near when the white man will be finished.
The signs are all around us.” Then George Lincoln Rockwell, leader
of the American Nazi Party, expounded his vicious creed of white
supremacy. Interviewed at his compound by the African American
journalist Alex Haley, he kept a pearl-handled revolver sitting on the
table next to him as he denounced blacks and Jews. The exchanges
were both chilling and memorable:

Rockwell: It’s nothing personal, but I want you to under-
stand that I don’t mix with your kind, and we call your race
“niggers.”

Haley: I’ve been called “nigger” many times, Commander,
but this is the first time I’m being paid for it. So you go right
ahead. What have you got against us “niggers”?

Rockwell: I just think you people would be happier in
Africa back where you came from. . . . Equality may be the
stated purpose [of the civil rights movement], but race mixing
is what it boils down to in practice, and the harder you people
push for that, the madder white people are going to get. 27

Playboy’s sensitivity to racial issues particularly influenced two
articles. In July 1962, Nat Hentoff presented “Through the Racial
Looking Glass,” an impassioned plea for understanding the new mili-
tancy emerging in the African American community. It explained
“the spiraling pride of race among American Negroes” and their

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197

bitterness about the slow progress on civil rights and the persistence
of economic discrimination. In a very different kind of piece, James
Baldwin, the eminent black writer, discussed his artistic efforts to
explore the subject of race. “The reality I am trying to get at,” he con-
cluded movingly, “is that the humanity of this submerged population
[of African Americans] is equal to the humanity of anyone else, equal
to yours, equal to that of your child.” 28

Hefner and Playboy’s social and political orientation in the early
1960s reflected a Kennedyesque sensibility. Promoting energy, youth,
and boldness, it played up the theme of a new generation and affirmed
liberal causes. Sympathy for human freedom, Playboy suggested, was
another mark of the sophisticated modern male. Ironically, however,
the publishers growing public engagement was accompanied by a
private withdrawal. Rarely leaving the controlled environment of the
Playboy Mansion, he labored for days on end with little sense of time
and had ever fewer encounters with the outside world. Hefners fan-
tasy, while still vivid to the outside world, seemed to turn inward and
become a private dream.

Ill

The social scene at the Playboy Mansion became everything Hefner
had dreamed of when he moved into the residence. He had refur-
bished the wonderful old house with an eye toward entertainment,
and in the early 1960s it became packed with lavish parties, movie
screenings, and famous guests. Those in attendance often felt swept
up in “a timeless, spaceless sensation,” as Norman Mailer described
it. “One was in an ocean liner which traveled at the bottom of the
sea, on a spaceship wandering down the galaxy along a night whose
duration was a year.” 29

The festivities were enhanced by sexual encounters between
young men and women who cavorted in the huge ballroom, indoor
swimming pool, or underground bar. “We were all enjoying the sow-
ing of wild oats — men and women alike . . . with absolutely no strings
attached,” described Keith Hefner. “Old rules didn’t apply,” said
Murray Fisher. “It was like going to some infants paradise, where
you could eat all the candy you wanted and you wouldn’t get fat.” The
mansion’s atmosphere simply bowled over many who experienced it.

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MR. PLAYBOY

As Bob Hope quipped about Hefners parties, “It’s this guys world.
He just lets us live in it.” 30

But this joyful, uninhibited picture became blurred in a peculiar
way as Hefner increasingly retreated from the hedonistic scene he
created. He holed up for long stretches in his private quarters at the
Playboy Mansion, attending movie screenings and making cameo
appearances at many parties. But just as often he stayed out of sight.
By the time he started writing the Playboy Philosophy, he had aban-
doned his corporate office for his bedroom, where he worked in his
pajamas, ate junk food and swilled Pepsis by the dozen, and drew thick
curtains across the windows to keep out sunlight. He slept and ate as
he felt the need, regardless of the time of day or night. He became
a recluse. “I rarely went out. But why should I?” Hefner said of his
unconventional lifestyle. “Everything I wanted was already there.” 31

But there was more to it. Hefners physical and emotional with-
drawal, in many ways, had a chemical basis. By the late 1950s, he had
slipped into a habit that would corrode his editorial skills over the
next decade. In 1957, he complained that an exhausting work sched-
ule was putting him to sleep at his desk and Victor Lownes suggested
Dexedrine, an appetite suppressant that kept you awake and alert.
Hefner tried one and was delighted when it boosted his energy and
concentration. He began gobbling dexies and, according to Lownes,
was soon staying up “for three or four days, without sleeping or
eating, hardly blinking, working feverishly around the clock with the
single-minded intensity of a maniac.” 32

By 1958, Hefner had developed a drug dependency. “Can we get a
new supply of Dexedrine to fortify the troops during the next all-night
mission?” he wrote in a June memo. A few months later he requested:
“Can we get a new supply of Dexedrine to the fourth floor — our pres-
ent quantity is running low and, as you know, the total operation of
Playboy is now dependent on those little orange pills.” 33

Not surprisingly, Dexedrine made Hefners professional judgment
increasingly erratic. Spectorsky complained to Hefner that his dexie-
induced schedule made it nearly impossible for the staff to consult with
him while fostering an unfortunate preference for purple prose. “I think
that by the time you do buckle down to reading a piece, it’s got to be
in neon to hold your attention, it’s got to be like headlines,” Spectorsky
wrote. “It makes it damn hard for those of us who live more conven-
tionally to know what you’ll respond to, and how you’ll respond.” 34

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199

By the early 1960s, Hefners Dexedrine habit was causing severe
problems. While Ray Russell resigned in 1960 from a desire to become
a freelance writer, he also had lost patience with his boss’s “distortion
of perception and judgment. . . . Hef had always been a great guy to
work for, but now I could never be sure when I was working for him
or for the pill.” Dick Rosenzweig, who became Hefners executive
assistant in 1963, was shocked as his boss came to look like “he had
popped out of Dachau. He was skin and bones because, among other
things, the dexies take away your appetite.” 35

The dexies influenced everything. They produced gargan-
tuan memos where Hefner would stay up all night, talking into his
Dictaphone, with the results subsequently transcribed and distributed
to long-suffering staffers. “Hefner made a point of never saying any-
thing in 10 words if he could use 100, never saying anything once if he
could repeat it three or four times,” Lownes noted. “The joke we all
told at the time was that you had to take a dexy just to read those god-
damn memos.” Editorial meetings were erratically called, frequently
canceled, and invariably late starting. Executives called Rosenzweig
to see where Hefner was positioned in the drug cycle before they
scheduled an appointment, knowing that he could be explosively
ill-tempered when he was coming out of a binge. Dexies also shaped
the manic composition of the Playboy Philosophy. Associates described
him as a “demonic” recluse in his bedroom bunker, speeding like crazy
as he covered the material from every imaginable angle, then crashing
into a sleeping stupor before beginning the cycle all over again. 36

The ultimate dexie ordeal came with the writing and publication of
“The Chicago Mansion,” a story on his residence composed in the fall
of 1965. Hefner cherished the project and its composition became
a drug-driven obsession. He began firing off Tolstoyan memos on
early drafts, and more revisions brought more memos. After several
weeks, Spectorsky threw in the towel. “Here is the fruit of weekend
and Monday work by the entire staff with the help of 57 pages of
single-spaced memos from you,” he wrote Hefner. “Hef, I have lost
all judgment on this. ... I do not recall a time in my life when I felt so
defeated by a job that I have lived with, awake and in my dreams, for
days. . . . You can reach me at home; I am ill and going to bed.” 37
With only a week before deadline, Hefner took over the wri ti ng and
brought Murray Fisher in to assist. An unforgettable ordeal unfolded
as Fisher sat next to the publisher for several days and nights, stopping

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MR. PLAYBOY

only to grab a sandwich or catch a couple hours of sleep. “I matched
him Pepsi for Pepsi, Dexie for Dexie, and the more I took the more
reasonable he seemed to me,” Fisher recalled. For endless hours
Flefner painstakingly examined each sentence, crossing out nearly
every word and agonizing over its replacement. “By the fourth day, we
were both hallucinating vividly — unfortunately, not always the same
thing,” Fisher described. They finally finished the piece as the sun
came up on Thanksgiving Day, and the assistant editor confessed he
“had a lot to be thankful for: somehow, I had survived.” 38

But Hefner s reclusive habits did not tarnish his image. Paradoxically,
his withdrawal only seemed to increase the mystique surrounding
him. Controversy also contributed, as with a headline-grabbing trial
that brought him before a Chicago jury on charges of obscenity in
November 1963. After a complaint by Chicago Citizens for Decent
Literature, a Catholic group first offended by his stalwart defense of
Lenny Bruce after his recent arrest for obscenity, Chicago police had
arrested Hefner for a Playboy pictorial on Jayne Mansfield. Widely
covered by newspapers, radio, and television and packed with spec-
tators, the proceedings in the Chicago Municipal Court became a
circus. A Playboy press agent handed out copies of “The Playboy
Philosophy.” The consultation room for Hefner and his attorney
displayed a full-color picture of the pope. Prosecution experts testi-
fied that the Mansfield pictorial inflamed the sexual appetite, while
Hefners attorney countered with a discussion of Benjamin Franklins
“Letters to Young Men on Choosing a Mistress” and termed him “a
playboy of 1776.” Hefner, accompanied by a beautiful Playmate, testi-
fied that only 5 percent of the material in his magazine was devoted to
nude or seminude women. After a hung jury refused to condemn the
publisher, the prosecution was dropped and Hefner emerged from
the trial with an enhanced image as a defender of free speech. 39

Hefners love life in the early 1960s fed the publics fascination.
The Playboy publisher pushed the erotic pedal to the floor, observ-
ing, “I remember quite clearly the first time I realized that I had
slept with a different girl every night the previous week. Wild, crazy,
wonderful. ... At long last, I had managed to find my Jazz Age, the
Boaring Twenties of my dreams.” The mansion became “a bache-
lors paradise” for the fulfillment of his fantasies and, in his words,
“I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself if I had discovered
fire or invented the wheel.” 40

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201

Hefner had dozens of casual sexual liaisons with Playmates.
During the shooting of the “Playmate Holiday House Party” for the
December 1961 issue, he was involved with eleven of the twelve
participating Playmates, according to Joni Mattis. Hefner gloried
in his Don Juan image, noting that “reputation actually made you
more attractive to women.” A notorious fling came with Donna
Michele, a sultry eighteen-year-old ballet dancer and actress who
became Playmate of the Year in 1963. She accompanied Hefner to
the Mansfield obscenity trial — she sulked when the Kennedy assassi-
nation interrupted Chicago nightlife and preempted television — and
then to Jamaica for a weeks vacation in early 1964, but soon departed
to pursue a movie career. 41

Throughout this period, however, Hefner steadily dated two young
women. Cynthia Maddox served as his regular girlfriend from 1961
to 1963 and Mary Warren from 1963 to 1968. He became very close to
both, and their relationships with the Playboy editor revealed much
about his state of mind. Exhilarated by the atmosphere of sexual lib-
eration and determined to dominate his romances, Hefner molded
these young women into the larger pattern of his life and work.

Cynthia Maddox had begun working at Playboy in 1959 as a recep-
tionist, and slowly worked her way up to become an editor in the car-
toon department. Strikingly beautiful, she was, in Hefners words, “the
blond, blue-eyed, pink-skinned beauty with the knockout body that
you mooned over at your desk in high school.” Maddox originally had
caught the eye of Victor Lownes, who pursued her relentlessly. When
he put his hand on her knee under a table at lunch, she would stare
coldly, grab the hand, and slap it back on the tabletop. Hefner found
Lownes s public humiliation hilarious. 42

Hefner set his own sights on Maddox. He found her stern resis-
tance to Lownes admirable, and relished a challenge in the fact
that she was “the company virgin. Everyone knew she was a virgin
because she made such a point of it,” he said. The two began dating
and developed a starry-eyed romance. When Maddox finally decided
to consummate the relationship, he arranged a trip to the West Coast
and rented a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Upon returning to
Chicago, she moved into an apartment in the Playboy Mansion. 43

The pair had a smooth working relationship. As assistant cartoon
editor, Maddox worked side by side with Hefner for a long session
each week and they “absolutely agreed about cartoons,” in her words.

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MR. PLAYBOY

They spent weekends together as well as an evening or two a week, and
she accompanied Hefner to New York for the Playboy Jazz Awards,
and to Los Angeles for a visit with the artist Alberto Vargas and his
wife. Maddox’s beauty made her a natural for the magazine and she
ended up as Playboy cover girl five times from 1962 to 1966. 44

The couple shared many interests, watching old Nelson
Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald movies from the 1930s and consulting
on the purchase of modern paintings for the mansion. But Maddox
had a strong streak of jealousy that made Hefner uncomfortable. At
the opening of the New York Playboy Club in 1962, a pretty brunette
followed the editor back to his room uninvited. He was politely try-
ing to get rid of her when Maddox came in and, convinced he was
fooling around, exploded in anger. “When Cynthia got mad she threw
things,” Hefner said. “She started with a book and was reaching for
a lamp when the phone rang. . . . She locked herself in the bathroom
for a time, before accepting my innocence and making up.” 45

Maddox adored Hefners sweet and funny side and found man-
sion life tremendously exciting with its music and parties, celebrities
and brilliant guests. It was “just like being a movie star,” she told
a journalist. At the same time, she increasingly felt trapped in her
famous boyfriends life. All their activities revolved around him and
she complained that he dominated any discussions or disagreements
that they had. “Sometimes, God, I don’t feel like I have any identity
of my own,” she confessed in a newspaper interview. “I would like
someone who really notices me, really can respect me, really can
remember things about me — some man who thinks about me when
I’m away from him.” 46

Maddox also grew increasingly disturbed over Hefner’s dalliances
with other women. “I’ve been dating Hef for about a year. He dates other
girls and I don’t like it. He knows that I don’t like it,” she complained
in The Most. (She also created an indelible image of the ditzy blonde,
telling the interviewer, “Discussions go on back and forth and we try to
work things out very intelligubly . . . uh, intellijub ...” as she stumbled
over the word “intelligently.” Laughing embarrassedly, she dropped
her prop, retrieved it as the shoulder strap on her dress slipped down,
and tried to recover with a breathy Marilyn Monroe-style “Hi!”) She
resented his double standard where he expected to date others while
she remained faithful. In public she acted unconcerned, but “inside,
it was killing me.” Sometimes when the anger boiled up, she stomped
on material he had laid out for the magazine. 47

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203

Finally, a frustrated Maddox engaged in several affairs of her own
and the romance with Hefner began to cool by the summer of 1963.
She also began to see a psychiatrist in hopes of recovering her self-
regard. The two drifted apart, although they would reconnect ami-
ably in later years. As Maddox said, “When I walked out, I was ready
to leave and I didn’t miss it.” 48

In late summer 1963, Hefner met Mary Warren, a tall, stately
twenty-year-old with green eyes and a great figure. They were imme-
diately attracted to each other, and after the publishers fling with
Donna Michele ended, they settled into a long relationship. Warren
worked at the magazine as a receptionist, and then became a door
Bunny at the Chicago Playboy Club. Like Maddox, she was a virgin
when she met Hefner. Such innocence always attracted the publisher,
who confessed that he became caught up in “the feeling that the girl
could love you. Only you. And that it was all-encompassing.” 49

Warren possessed an uncommonly sweet temperament — a quiet,
friendly, unspoiled quality — that struck many who met her. “There
was something special about Mary,” said Nat Lehrman. “She had no
hard edges.” This may have stemmed from her religious background.
Her mother was appalled when she joined Playboy , predicting, “The
next thing, you’ll be sleeping in Hefner’s round bed!” 50

When Warren moved into the mansion, she utterly devoted her-
self to Hefner. Her dedication to him became legendary. “If home,
work, TV, and the time of day are all geared to his needs, it is under-
standable that he would have a woman that molds her life to his,” said
Shel Silverstein. “Mary did that.” She secluded herself in the mansion
with him and appreciated the few occasions when they ventured
out together: a long walk through the neighborhood in the rain, a jaunt
to the Old Town Art Festival, an evening at a nightclub, and a skiing
trip to Aspen. Hefner appreciated her dedication, describing her as
“one of the sweetest, most devoted women I’ve ever known.” 51

But Warren’s devotion came at a price. Beset by insecurities, she
floundered in establishing a sense of self-worth amid the constant
attention focused on Hefner. A 1965 story in Life magazine described
her sitting in his bedroom performing perfunctory tasks as she waited
for him to break from work. “I wouldn’t think of interrupting Hefner,”
she said. “I would never have anything that important to say.” When
asked if she was happy in her life with the publisher, she replied duti-
fully, “I regard it as an honor, a pleasure, and a wonderful experience.”
Perhaps as a reflection of her uncertain identity, Warren changed her

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MR. PLAYBOY

hair color many times — from blonde to chestnut to brunette — during
her years as Hefners girlfriend. 52

Despite her best efforts, Warren also had trouble accepting her
boyfriends womanizing. Sally Bealls, Hefners administrative assis-
tant, took Warren under her wing and often heard the young woman
pour her heart out about her desire to settle down with Hefner, who
regularly saw other women. Bealls tried to joke that the publisher
was merely “doing research,” but Warren found little consolation in
the humor. Hefner, with his usual honesty, did not try to hide the
situation. “Right now, my special girl is Mary. It has lasted three and
a half years,” he told Look magazine in 1965. “But in the meantime,
I have had many less important relationships.” In fact, he reveled in
his many sexual liaisons. Growing restless around the holidays in late
1964, he turned elsewhere for female attention. “There was a deli-
cious decadence in spending Christmas day in bed with three girls,”
he reported. 53

Warren’s desire for marriage and family found a temporary sur-
rogate with Humphrey, a lovable St. Bernard puppy she and Hefner
adopted and named after his favorite actor, Humphrey Bogart. She
hosted a mansion party for the newborn pup in July 1964. A 1965
magazine story painted a rather sad picture of her keeping the puppy
in a playpen in the master bedroom, addressing him as “Baby” and
Hefner as “Daddy” and herself as “Mommy.” While Hefner worked
on his bed, Warren tried not to disturb him while cuddling and play-
ing with Humphrey. 54

Slowly, Warren assumed a quiet air of sadness. While photographs
appeared to show a happy, beautiful young woman on her famous
boyfriends arm, a closer look revealed hollow smiles and melan-
choly eyes. A series of cards and notes to Hefner offered glimpses
of her insecurity and resignation. One said, “In this modern world of
blase sophistication, its certainly a relief to know someone like you,
who derives pleasure from the simpler things in life. Like me! Love,
Mary.” A 1964 birthday card contained a poem in her handwriting:
“Although I nag you so very much — Please don’t evict me from your
rabbit hutch! Love, Mary.” A late 1965 card contained this mournful
note: “My heart is blue, ’cause I don’t know if you love me like I love
you. Love, Mary.” 55

In the fall of 1965, Warren moved out of the mansion. Living in an
apartment less than a block away, she continued to date him for more

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205

than two years as they went to mansion parties, opened Playboy Clubs,
and occasionally went skiing. In 1967 she quit Playboy to become
executive secretary for a medical researcher at Michael Reese
Hospital as the relationship wound down. In July 1968, Warren sent
a final, bittersweet anniversary card to Hefner. The front said, “As
long as we’ve got each other . . .” and then opened to read, “Who
needs happiness. Love forever, Mary.” 56

Hefner’s romantic life in the early 1960s displayed what would
become a lifelong pattern. He maintained a primary relationship
with a young woman over several years, all the while seeing other
comely females on a regular basis. In love with love but determined to
avoid commitment, he openly, honestly adhered to a double standard:
he could date others but his girlfriends could not. Like the social con-
cerns appearing in his magazine, Hefner’s love life defied the norms of
respectable middle-class America as he created a lifestyle tailored to his
own desires. Yet, as Tom Wolfe pointed out, many average Americans
also were seeking fulfillment by challenging traditional restrictions on
the pursuit of happiness. Once again, it seemed, the publisher had
positioned himself at the cutting edge of social change.

But the unruly spirit that energized Hefner, Playboy , and American
society in the early 1960s would soon appear tame. The brisk winds
of dissent in that period within a short time would build into a hurri-
cane of rebellion that threatened to tear apart the social and political
fabric of the United States. Like many Americans, Hefner would find
himself caught up in an upheaval dwarfing anything he could have
imagined. With typical shrewdness, he maneuvered himself and his
magazine right into the heart of the storm.

Make Love, Not War

I n the summer of 1966, Hugh Hefner returned to the United States
I flush with excitement. Journeying to England for the opening of
I the London Playboy Club and Casino, he had been galvanized
by the creative energy pulsating throughout the city. In fact, “Swinging
London” had captured much of the world s imagination as the center
of a popular culture renaissance in the mid-1960s featuring the pop
music of the Beatles, the daring “mod” fashions of Mary Quant, the
films of Tony Richardson, the acting of Terence Stamp, the photog-
raphy of David Bailey, the experimental theater of John Osborne,
and the hairstylings of Vidal Sassoon. Permeating the atmosphere
was a spirit of liberated sexuality. “London today is in many ways
the cheerful, violent, lusty town of William Shakespeare,” wrote Time
magazine. Hefner believed that the city’s spirit of cultural ferment
soon would appear in the United States. 1

Little did he know. Even as his plane touched down in Chicago,
dissatisfaction with traditional values was building explosively. Dissent
over American military involvement in Vietnam was mushrooming,
the civil rights movement was becoming militant, and restless college
students were questioning the bureaucratic structures dominating

206

MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR

207

modern life. Even more broadly, growing numbers within an affluent
middle class were turning rebellious in the name of personal freedom
and fulfillment. Challenges to old-fashioned American values of self-
control, piety, and respect for authority seemed to materialize on
every front.

Mainstream media registered the social discontent. In a 1967
cover story titled “The Permissive Society,” Newsweek explored
Americas growing agitation. Probing a Zeitgeist in flux, the article
noted that “old taboos are dead or dying” as American movies,
novels, plays, music lyrics, and advertising were adopting wholesale
a vocabulary of frank language and sexual images. An even larger
collapse of restraint regarding obscenity, premarital sex, and nudity
left many Americans bewildered and confused. “The shattering of
taboos on language, fashion, and manners generally is part of a larger
disintegration of moral consensus in America,” Newsweek concluded.
Hefner figured prominently in the story as a symbol of the new sexual
openness, asking, “Why are laughter, anger or pity legitimate reac-
tions [among adults], but not sexual excitement?” 2

The journalist and historian Max Lerner ruminated similarly. In a
1967 newspaper column he argued that America had evolved from
a “production society” into a “swinging pleasure society” marked by a
plethora of consumer items and pulsating desires for personal free-
dom, fulfilling experiences, and “expressive lives.” Lerner also cited
Hefner, arguing that the publisher was trying “to provide a frame for
a hedonic life — a frame of reasoned principle” in Playboy . 3

Over the next few years, Hefner would figure even more promi-
nently in a period of turbulence that stretched American society to
the breaking point. As racial rioting, political pandemonium, massive
civil disobedience, and bitter clashes over cultural values became
common fare, he and his magazine stood at the center of the action.
Indeed, the half decade from 1966 to 1971 marked the peak of the
Playboy ascendancy. As the sexual revolution now exploded full force
as part of a larger cultural upheaval, Hefner remained its most promi-
nent advocate and symbol. At the same time, he moved to the left
politically and became a spokesman for nuclear disarmament, racial
reconciliation, personal liberation, and an enlarged welfare state.

But an internal tension characterized Playboy’s new agenda of
social and political activism. As some observers noted, Hefners maga-
zine maintained an uncomfortable conflict between its promotion of

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MR. PLAYBOY

hedonism and material affluence — sports cars, fine wines, fashionable
clothing, chic apartments, fancy stereos — and its espousal of apolitical
ethos that attacked corporate profit-making, denounced “the estab-
lishment,” and demanded uplift of the downtrodden. To certain of his
allies on the left, Hefner increasingly seemed to be upholding with
one hand the very system he was attacking with the other. He seemed
to reflect, in the memorable phrase of Tom Wolfe, a species of 1960s
“radical chic” — the glib embrace of political radicalism by social elites
firmly ensconced within the system. 4

But such tension would not bear fruit for some time. Meanwhile,
the Playboy editor became what he had always dreamed of being —
not only a full-fledged popular culture celebrity but a serious player
in the shaping of modern American values. Heeded as never before,
he emerged as the prince of 1960s hedonism.

Hefners growing prominence appeared unmistakably on the cover
of Time magazine on March 3, 1967. Under a diagonal yellow slash
announcing “The Pursuit of Hedonism,” a wooden sculpture by
fashionable avant-garde artist Marisol rendered the publisher as an
“All-American boy” in red, white, and blue on two blocks of wood. The
feature story inside proved equally provocative, if less flattering.

While Time presented Hefner as “prophet of pop hedonism,”
it scarcely concealed its tone of contempt. The feature described
him as an “impresario of spectator sex,” a fanatic who spread “the
gospel of pleasure with a dogged devotion that would do credit to
any missionary,” and a juvenile who appealed to “the undergraduate
who wants to act like a sophisticate.” Nonetheless, Time grudgingly
concluded that he reflected something significant in modern life.
Playboy's popularity indicated that “the puritan ethic was dying, that
pleasure and leisure were becoming positive and universally adored
values in American society.” 5

Over the next few months Hefner seemed to be everywhere. He
gave scores of newspaper and magazine interviews and appeared as
a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Joey Bishop
Show on ABC, and the syndicated Bill Dana Show. NBC News gave
him a starring role in its May 8, 1967, prime-time special The Pursuit

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of Pleasure, which examined the growing hunger for affluence, leisure,
and self-gratification among ordinary Americans. The host, Sander
Vanocur, described him as “the Chairman Mao of the sexual revolu-
tion, issuing maxims for moral guerrilla warfare,” and characterized
Playboy as “the McGuffey’s reader of the sexually literate.” Hefner
sat alongside the noted conservative commentator William F. Buckley
and the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, in the library of the Playboy
Mansion. Puffing on his trademark pipe, he insisted that the old reli-
gious basis of morality had faded and a new foundation was required.
Quick on his rhetorical feet, he held his own with these intellectual
heavyweights. 6

Meanwhile, Hefners enterprise flourished. By 1968 the magazine s
circulation stood at five and a half million, its clubs and merchandis-
ing operations were flourishing, and plans were afoot for a new syndi-
cated television show. Statistics revealed that from 1963 to 1969, the
company’s yearly sales rose from $26 million to $96 million as Playboy
remained at the center of what Newsday called a “budding real estate,
publishing, entertainment conglomerate.” Arbiters of American
business sat up and took notice as Business Week, Generation: The
Magazine of Young Businessmen, and Barron’s all ran flattering sto-
ries on the dramatic growth of the Playboy empire. 7

Hefner displayed his growing wealth and influence in two highly
publicized moves. First, in the spring of 1967, after a lengthy reno-
vation, Playboy occupied its chic new headquarters in the recently
christened Playboy Building. Second, in the summer of 1967 Hefner
ordered a personal Douglas DC9 jetliner for $4.5 million. Dubbed the
Big Bunny, it was painted black because “it epitomized elegance,
the kind of elegance once associated with a limousine,” in Hefners
words — and had the magazine s bunny logo emblazoned in white
on the tail. He spent an additional $1 million on remodeling that
brought large, cushioned seats that transformed into sleeping berths,
a videotape system and retractable screen, television monitors, a
discotheque and bar, conference areas separated by fiberglass parti-
tions, and a galley capable of preparing an eight-course meal for thirty
diners. Its interior decoration utilized hand-rubbed rosewood, black
leather, and oiled bronze. Hefners private quarters in the rear of the
plane housed a six-by-eight-foot elliptical bed complete with special
seat belts and a Tasmanian opossum spread, a stereo and videotape
system, a motorized swivel chair, and a shower with two nozzles.

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MR. PLAYBOY

A crew of eight “jet bunnies” dressed in black miniskirted uniforms
with knee-high boots served as stewardesses. This extravagant
“Playboy pad with wings,” as Look magazine described it, quickly
became the supreme symbol of Hefners pleasure-filled lifestyle. 8

As Hefner and his enterprise flourished, Playboy expanded its
reach. The magazine continued to serve up healthy portions of erotic
pictorials, ranging from nude photographs of Jane Fonda on the set
of a French film to “The Bunnies of Missouri.” On the literary front,
a growing crowd of notable writers flocked to the magazine. From
1966 to 1970, Jean-Paul Sartre, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow,
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Updike, Graham Greene, and Joyce Carol
Oates contributed stories and essays. 9

The Playboy “pleasure-primer” of stylish consumption expanded
in accordance with the rapid growth of a consumer economy in the
1960s. Features explored topics such as the merits of various small
aircraft available to the busy entrepreneur, the building of a modem
business wardrobe, and the rewards of continental travel. The maga-
zine continued to survey the entertainment world of music, movies,
and comedy, frequently turning to high-profile celebrities such as
Federico Fellini, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Michelangelo Antonioni,
and Stanley Kubrick for “Playboy Interviews.” 10

Most significantly, however, Playboy threw itself wholeheartedly
into politics. The first tentative forays in the early 1960s now became
a full-scale charge into a public arena grown volatile by mid-decade.
Racial tensions exploded with African American rioting in Americas
cities during the “long hot summers,” which in turn generated a
strong white backlash. American involvement in the Vietnam conflict
triggered the first waves of antiwar protests. A more generalized dis-
content with prevailing social and economic power structures swept
through college campuses. Hefners magazine responded by becom-
ing a standard-bearer for liberal causes.

In 1966, James Farmer, the black leader of the Congress of Racial
Equality, praised the transformation of the civil rights crusade into
“a full-fledged revolutionary movement.” Playboy’s panel discussion
on “The Crisis in Law Enforcement” pondered the rise in crime,
growing conservative animosity toward “bleeding heart” judges, and
liberal fears about the expansion of government police powers. Max
Lemer offered a long, carefully reasoned essay advocating admission
of communist China into the United Nations. 11

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211

The following year, Playboy examined the growing wave of protests
in the United States and concluded that “dissent is an obligation that
everyone opposed to the status quo owes himself and society.” It
analyzed domestic disturbances and suggested that an American
proclivity for violence stemmed from poverty, excessive repression,
and a boundless individualism. A critique of police policies and prac-
tices informed readers that “despite new Supreme Court safeguards
of our civil rights and liberties, police brutality prevails and the police
mentality assumes guilt until proven innocent.” 12

Playboy Interviews became particularly political. A 1966 session
with the historian and political adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. explored
his views on Americas Vietnam involvement, domestic policies, and
the civil rights movement. An interview with Fidel Castro focused on
America’s rift with Cuba and larger ideological issues at work in the
Cold War. Meanwhile, the magazines cultural commentary began to
highlight the growing assault on American middle-class values. An
extensive discussion with the drug guru Timothy Leary focused on LSD,
psychedelics, and legal restrictions on their use. A long analysis of the
“underground press” surveyed the “always uninhibited, often outra-
geous, sometimes unintelligible anti-establishment newspapers” that
had sprung up as venues for dissent. 13

In December 1967, Playboy showcased its expanded profile.
The issue — some 320 pages long with a psychedelic cover of
wavy, distorted lettering set against a bright background of purple,
bright green, and orange — seemed to take in everything going on
in contemporary America. Readers encountered erotic pleasures
ranging from the monthly Playmate, Lynn Winchell, to “Art Nouveau
Erotica” and “The Wicked Dreams of Elke Sommer”; stories by Isaac
Bashevis Singer, P. G. Wodehouse, and Irwin Shaw; celebrity fea-
tures on television host Johnny Carson and actor Walter Matthau;
sophisticated consumer pieces on traveling to the Winter Olympics
in Grenoble, France, and shopping for the latest high-tech gifts and
gadgets for Christmas. They also found a range of political pieces.
One related how a dean at Harvard left to become director of fresh-
man studies at Miles College, a small, unaccredited Negro college
near Birmingham, Alabama. John Kenneth Galbraith presented a
proposal for extracting America from Vietnam, while Justice William
O. Douglas examined “Big Brother” governmental intrusions into
Americans’ private lives. 14

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MR. PLAYBOY

Playboy’s final 1967 issue captured the sensibility of that
era — politically engaged, yet optimistic, inclusive, and high on the
“peace and love” possibilities of a new age. Much like the Summer
of Love in 1967 and the March on the Pentagon, it reflected a wide-
spread attitude of hope that reasonable, open-minded people of
goodwill could work to resolve pressing problems. But this optimistic
tone would not last, either in America or in Playboy. Within a few
weeks, the country seemed to explode.

Shortly after midnight on August 27, 1968, Hefner, Max Lerner,
Jules Feiffer, John Dante, and Bobbie Arnstein ventured out of the
Playboy Mansion and walked toward Lincoln Park. They wanted to
observe firsthand the battleground occupied by police and protes-
tors as the Democratic National Convention convened in Chicago.
Violent clashes had erupted as thousands of antiwar protesters had
converged on the city and the police had responded with beatings and
mass arrests. Film accounts of the bloody confrontations had domi-
nated national network news and the pungent smell of tear gas had
wafted through large areas of the central urban area. Hefner, increas-
ingly political, had been absorbed in the growing controversy. 15

In fact, some dissidents in the Democratic Party had made the
Playboy Mansion their unofficial headquarters for the convention.
A few days before it convened, Hefner had cosponsored (along with
John Kenneth Galbraith and George Plimpton) a black-tie, $100
per ticket fund-raiser at his home for the insurgent peace candi-
date, Senator Eugene McCarthy. Subsequently, he hosted what the
New York Times described as a “week-long party for the beautiful
people” of the Democratic Party. Liberal activists such as Cleveland
mayor Carl Stokes, Boston mayor Kevin White, civil rights leader
Jesse Jackson, California industrialist Ed Pauley Jr., and actor Warren
Beatty frequented the mansion, shaping strategy and enjoying the
hospitality.

But now the seriousness of the situation confronted Hefner
directly. As his little group glimpsed a large crowd of demonstrators
approaching with an escort of angry police, they sensed danger
and headed back to the mansion. Just then, a police car pulled up and

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several officers jumped out, pointing shotguns and yelling at them
to go home. When Hefner explained that was precisely what they
were trying to do, an officer whacked him across the buttocks with a
billy club, causing a large bruise to form. When news of the incident
appeared, one wag suggested that the police had seen a pajama-clad
figure and mistook him for a Viet Cong, but Hefner was not amused.
He called a news conference at the mansion to denounce unpro-
voked police brutality. “The squad car almost ran us down. We saw
an uptight establishment. Goading people, looking for something
to attack,” he described. Hefner vowed to become more politically
involved in light of his experience. “Last night I saw so-called law and
order, without any consideration for justice or democracy,” he said.
“That doesn’t separate us very far from totalitarian society.” 16

Hefners experience offered a snapshot of the divisions threatening
to tear the United States apart at the end of the decade. The uproar
in Chicago capped several months of domestic disruption in America
probably unequaled since the Civil War a century earlier. Throughout
America, youths were flocking to the standard of the counterculture
with its ethos of “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” The Tet Offensive by
communist forces in Vietnam revealed a military stalemate and trig-
gered massive antiwar demonstrations and campus revolts. The dom-
inant Democratic Party splintered under the pressure as challenges
from two peace candidates, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert
F. Kennedy, caused President Lyndon B. Johnson to announce his
withdrawal from the race. Meanwhile, a powerful conservative back-
lash developed as Republican Richard M. Nixon gained support for
his “law and order” campaign and Alabama governor George Wallace,
a third-party candidate, promised an even stronger crackdown on civil
rights and antiwar agitators. By early summer 1968, anger, despair,
and rioting swept through the country in the wake of the stunning
assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, which
occurred within a few weeks of each other. The country stood polar-
ized between radical advocates of change and staunch defenders of
authority and stability, while many in the middle remained confused,
resentful, and frightened. 17

In this atmosphere of public turmoil, Hefner clearly positioned
himself as a voice of left-liberal dissent. His critique of American
authority, of course, began with the sexual revolution and its
potential for creating a new, liberated world of personal happiness.

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MR. PLAYBOY

Birth control had separated sex from reproduction and allowed it to
be “considered as purely pleasurable,” he argued, and people were
finally overcoming their tendency “to make something hidden and
presumably evil out of the human body.” 18

But sexual revolution was only part of a larger movement aimed
at dismantling barriers to personal fulfillment and promoting human
liberation, he continued. As he told the Saturday Evening Post ,
“Exactly the same things that are causing the sexual revolution in
this country are also causing the civil rights revolution and the dissent
on Vietnam and the student protests.” Sexual freedom was one aspect
of a broader crusade linking “racial freedom, social freedom, political
freedom, liberality.” The common enemy was an insidious, repres-
sive, outdated Puritanism and at stake was American self-government.
The question of forbidding erotic material for private enjoyment, he
claimed in 1969, went to a larger question of “whether you want a
democracy or some form of authoritarian society that is predicated on
the premise that man is weak and can’t rule himself politically, can’t
rule himself socially, can’t rule himself sexually.” 19

As Hefner veered left politically in the late 1960s, he condemned
America’s anticommunist foreign policy, denounced its involvement
in the Vietnam War, and advocated United Nations control of its
nuclear arsenal. He endorsed the use of recreational drugs such as
marijuana and LSD, maintaining that in a democratic society “you
must be free to make your own decisions in terms of control over your
own mind and body.” In 1969, in a long series of interviews with the
writer Malcolm Boyd, he stressed his political commitment to indi-
vidual rights, a “more socialized capitalism” with government regula-
tions on a market economy, and the necessity of world government.
He also expressed sympathy for youthful dissent, asserting that “there
are far more men of goodwill under twenty-five than over.” 20

Hefner summarized his political credo in a few brief maxims:
“International law instead of warfare to control the possibility of
nuclear holocaust. An end to racism. An end to poverty around the
world. [To] the population explosion. [To] the pollution of our nat-
ural resources. Then, all that remains is disease. If we spent our
money on these things instead of war, by the year 2000 we could be
moving into a real golden age.” As he reminisced later about this
period, “I yearned for a world without boundaries in which men of
varying political, ethnic, and religious persuasions lived together in

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a free and just society. That was the sort of idealistic bleeding-heart
liberal I was.” 21

The late 1960s version of Playboy mirrored both the heightened
political sensibility of its founder and the confrontational mood grow-
ing in the United States. From 1968 to 1970 the magazine launched
a barrage of social criticism aimed at undermining bourgeois virtues
and Cold War values. This campaign materialized on several fronts.

The magazine endorsed a cultural politics of full-blown sexual
liberation, offering sympathetic portrayals of “The Sexual Freedom
League” and partner-swapping “swingers.” It surveyed college cam-
puses with an eye to discovering whether schools stood “in the van-
guard or on the sidelines regarding the abolition of restrictions on life,
liberty, and the pursuit of heterosexual happiness?” (The University
of Wisconsin ranked first while Bob Jones University ranked last.) It
presented in-depth interviews with medical researchers Drs. William
Masters and Virginia Johnson, whose book Human Sexual Response
unexpectedly had become a runaway best-seller, and Dr. Mary
Calderone, the pioneering advocate of sex education. 22

Playboy also closely examined the new sexual freedom in enter-
tainment. A long look at the avant-garde “theater of the nude” ana-
lyzed recent productions such as Hair, Dionysus in 69, and Futz! and
concluded that “eclipsing even Hollywood, the New York stage is tak-
ing it off — taking it all off.” The magazine presented a text-and-photo
feature on Oh! Calcutta! a controversial off-Broadway nudist romp
that “unabashedly satirizes — and celebrates — contemporary sexual
mores, hang-ups, and diversions.” 23

Editorially, the magazine denounced censorship of erotic materi-
als and advocated birth control and reform of divorce laws to allow for
easier, less contentious breakups. It also appealed for a more sympa-
thetic consideration of homosexuality, presenting letters from liberal
clergymen in the Playboy Forum arguing that “a genuine Christian
spirit demanded toleration and redemption, not moral condemna-
tion.” Playboy took the progressive position that a “sickness” formu-
lation should be dropped in favor of the more scientific “deviance,”
and that homosexuals, since they followed “a compulsion based on
phobic reaction to heterosexual stimuli,” should be encouraged to
seek therapeutic help. 24

More broadly, Playboy advocated a hip cultural politics in the
late 1960s that favored the abandonment of traditional restraints in

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MR. PLAYBOY

favor of personal freedom. Its fashion advice urged young men to
embrace a new sartorial freedom by abandoning coats and ties for
Nehru jackets, chains and pendants, and “leisure suits.” As one piece
put it, fashionable males should be “more involved in doing their own
thing than in being caught up in any specific fashion trend.” 25

The magazine sympathetically portrayed the swelling drug cul-
ture as another venue for self-exploration. Articles explored the links
between drugs and sexual ecstasy, advocated the decriminalization of
marijuana, and urged the loosening of legal restrictions on drugs of all
kinds. As a Playboy Panel on “The Drug Revolution” noted, drugs had
moved to the forefront in “the war between freedom and repression,
youth and age, powerlessness and power.” 26

Playboy became a bastion of left liberalism in its politics. It
defended the growing wave of youthful dissent and acclaimed the
recent student revolt. It denounced intrusive government power,
called for the end of Cold War military actions such as Vietnam,
and advocated a staunch environmentalism and expansion of social
welfare programs. It sought to make Christianity a force for ending
social ills as spokesmen such as Harvey Cox called for the resurrec-
tion of Jesus as “a joyous revolutionary” who would unlock “the radi-
cal potential in Christianity.” 27

Increasingly, Playboy enticed a distinguished list of liberal office-
holders and public figures to appear in its pages. They included
Senators J. William Fulbright, Jacob Javits, and Frank Church, who
wrote on such issues as the need for gun control, lowering the vot-
ing age, and reconfiguring American foreign policy. Supreme Court
justices William O. Douglas and Arthur J. Goldberg also contributed
articles, the former on the increase in water pollution and the latter
on the dangers posed to the Bill of Rights by advocates of law and
order. Martin Luther King Jr., who visited the mansion in October
1967 to discuss public issues, published the last piece he ever wrote
in the magazine. 28

The Playboy Interviews became a friendly forum for many lib-
eral activists. The list included war critic and draft counselor William
Sloane Coffin, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, civil rights spokes-
man Jesse Jackson, and radical lawyer William Kunstler. The maga-
zine even glamorized Marxist intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse,
described in a profile as a “septuagenarian superstar” who toured the
college lecture circuit attracting hordes of adoring young acolytes. 29

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217

Even Playboy’s monthly centerfolds periodically displayed a new
political sensibility. “Turned On” Playmate Debbie Hooper cam-
paigned for Senator Eugene McCarthy, dedicated herself to “help-
ing her generation unwind our uptight society,” and “grooves on
sunshine, sculpture, and progressive politics.” Playmate Gloria Root
was a “full-time radical” who determinedly protested the Vietnam
War while remaining “always on the move, always ready to challenge
authority, and always eager to have a good time.” Another Playmate,
“Tuned-In Dropout” Elaine Morton, rejected “establishment modes
of living” and dropped out of college to live in a converted milk truck
along the west coast of Baja California. 30

At decades end, Playboy reached the height of its political activ-
ism. In 1969, it presented a tandem tribute to the recently assas-
sinated Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. that glorified
their martyrdom to liberal causes. It also offered two long blue-
prints for social and political change — they were drawn up by a who’s
who of liberal public figures, including Theodore Sorensen, Mayor
John Lindsay, William Sloane Coffin, Senator Charles Percy, Cesar
Chavez, Julian Bond, and Senator George McGovern — that aimed to
solve problems of war, injustice, poverty, and pollution. In the fall of
a 1970, “Playboys Political Preference Chart” appeared for the fall
elections, grading candidates in key races around the country based
on the extent of their liberal views. 31

Thus the late 1960s politics of Hefner and his magazine lobbed
grenades into the camp of the political establishment and displayed
a libertarian streak dedicated to protecting the individual against
displays of governmental power, whether in the bedroom, the draft
board, or on city streets. But for all its radical rhetoric, Playboy s
politics were not revolutionary. While the magazine and its editor
sought to enhance personal liberation and social justice, this agenda
did not challenge Americas basic social and economic system. In
fact, as a number of critics pointed out, a certain tension emerged
between Hefners advocacy of sweeping social and political reform,
on the one hand, and his espousal of hedonism, material affluence,
and corporate success, on the other. 32

The Detroit Free Press, for instance, contended that the Playboy
scene appealed mainly to “Richard Nixon’s silent majority.” An
academic article argued that Playboy, far from challenging the stand-
ing order, represented the very spirit of modern American capitalism.

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MR. PLAYBOY

In the same way that Benjamin Franklin’s Protestant ethic of t hrift,
and hard work had provided the productive drive for an infant capi-
talism in the late 1700s, Hefners “ethics of consumption” set the
foundation for a mature capitalism. Franklins “productive industry”
had given way to Hefner’s “strenuous leisure” in the evolution of the
American socioeconomic system. 33

Some youthful radicals were less polite. Upon hearing that his
teacher was writing an article on Hefner, a Yale student launched a
profanity-laden denunciation of the publisher as the enemy. “Jesus,
he’s so materialistic. Playboy glorifies everything that is lousiest about
America,” said the young activist. “Those hairless, frozen blondes —
made up to look like the girl next door, and photographed in a phony,
out of focus way. And those goddamn conformist ads. Everybody is
sort of supernigger, with his unbelievable chick, his goddamn expen-
sive car, his shitty correct suit and shaving lotion and pad. Christ.”
Another young radical told a radio interviewer, “Playboy today is
practically the voice of the establishment. Young guys today are inter-
ested in more than cars and hi-fi sets and carefully posed pictures of
balloon-bosomed bunnies.” 34

Such tensions produced a confrontation in the pages of the Playboy
Forum. In 1969, a correspondent accused the magazine of hypocrisy,
professing to be for liberal change and social progress while doing
“everything you can to perpetuate the American upper-middle-class
way of life.” If genuine revolution ever came, he said, “the image
of the good life you hold up to Americans will be the first thing to
go.” Playboy replied angrily. It accused the reader of not only seek-
ing a future inhabited by gray-uniformed monks, but failing to grasp
the magazine’s position. “While the luxuries we portray may today
be enjoyed only by a fraction of the world’s peoples, we do not think
true social progress consists of sweeping those luxuries away but,
rather, in extending them to all (a possibility technology is making
both feasible and desirable),” it indignantly noted. “We see the good
life and social progress as vitally connected.” 35

This critique of Playboy ’ s faux radicalism found some confirmation
in the magazine itself. Throughout the late 1960s, it uneasily juxta-
posed its anti-establishment rhetoric with a celebration of consumer
abundance. Cesar Chavez, Jesse Jackson, and Tom Hayden, railing
against the oppressions of the system, appeared alongside J. Paul
Getty, the billionaire businessman who tutored readers on success

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in the corporate world. Such tension produced awkward moments.
The November 1970 issue, for instance, positioned “West of Eden,”
a sympathetic account of hippie communes (they were seeking “new
ways to live humanely with nature and one another”) immediately
next to “Presents Perfect,” a slick survey of the newest amenities
available to prosperous consumers. Accented by young women with
scant clothes and sultry stares, the glossily photographed bounty of
goods included a “three-screen TV, by Sony, for $695”; a “Volante
3000 transistorized polystyrene wall clock, from Design Group, $40”;
and an “eleven-channel mobile phone featuring compact transmitter-
receiver and easily mounted handset, by Symetrics, $1645.” Questions
of how communes and Cuisinarts, Cesar Chavez and J. Paul Getty
could be reconciled remained unanswered. 36

Hefner grew sensitive to such criticism. When pressed on his
simultaneous belief in affluence and radical politics, he replied,
“Eve showed that it’s possible to be a liberal and anti-establishment
and still be very successful.” Moreover, he insisted, youthful dissent-
ers erred in adopting “an anti-materialist mood.” “Many of them
resent Playboy because it espouses the virtues of materialism. The
real problem is how to get the benefits of materialism to the most
people possible.” He insisted that “materialism isn’t — and shouldn’t
be — a dirty word,” and provided no barrier to developing a “strong
social conscience.” Hefner tried to steer a careful course between
the old and the new: “Playboy has the establishment status symbols
yet we are iconoclastic and anti-establishment in our questioning of
the old mores.” 37

In another sense, however, the tension between Hefner’s defense
of material abundance and his political attack on the establishment
was less than his critics imagined. For much 1960s radicalism, in
fact, was less radical than it appeared. As Christopher Lasch observed,
this movement tended to view politics as street theater, a public per-
formance that valued style over substance and adopted “dramatic
gestures,” media manipulation, and “self-promotion.” Significantly,
most young radicals of this era were themselves the children of post-
war affluence whose commitment to self-gratification equaled that
of the establishment they attacked. The radical slogan “the personal
is the political” revealed a focus on consciousness-raising that, much
like the modern consumer capitalism it opposed, sought a goal of
self-fulfillment. Also like their opponents, dissenters rejected such

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MR. PLAYBOY

outmoded traditions as self-denial, duty, sacrifice to the common
good, and higher loyalties, all of which faded before the pressing
demands of personal transformation. Thus it was no accident that
Jerry Rubin, radical hero as one of the “Chicago Seven,” followed an
easy path from radical politics to a series of therapies in the 1970s
(Est, Rolfing, Gestalt, Esalen, meditation) to, finally, Madison Avenue
as a marketing analyst and venture capitalist. In other words, the pro-
found personalism of 1960s radicalism, almost as much as the capital-
ist structure it denounced, reflected the modem historical shift from
a society of scarcity and self-control to one of abundance, leisure, and
self-fulfillment. 38

This same overarching desire for self-fulfillment clearly fueled
much of the late 1960s politics of Hefner and his magazine. In 1969,
he argued that Americans no longer gained identity through work but
through avocation and recreation. Thus the most pressing modern
issue was to “get beyond the guilt that goes with pleasure” and forge
happiness based on play and satisfying desires. “Our basic thing is
about how to enjoy your leisure,” Hefner explained of the Playboy
ethos. Harvey Cox praised countercultural dissenters for rejecting
outdated notions of “work as the sole means of achieving human ful-
fillment” in favor of “devising a new leisure life style.” At the end of
the 1960s, in an article titled “Leisure in the Seventies,” Playboy
highlighted its commitment to self-fulfillment. Events of the last
decade, it contended, had revealed a profound struggle to adapt to
a new world where technology had created “more leisure time for
almost all of us — a prospect that frightens as many as it pleases.” This
demanded new strategies for “using our new time more creatively,
adopting personal pursuits that will become as much a part of our
identities as our jobs.” Ultimately, Playboy reassured, “the potential
pitfalls of the new leisure are outweighed by the promise of self-
exploration and discovery.” 39

So in many ways Hefner stood as a fitting symbol of 1960s rebel-
lion, although in ways neither he nor his critics ever fully understood.
Whether in politics or culture, the antagonists of this contentious
era — political radicals and aspiring executives, seekers of emotional
experience and seekers of material wealth, both the establishment
and its critics — endorsed the deeper claims of the self. In a mod-
em American culture where the demands of self-realization infused
everything, notions of commitments above and beyond personal need

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failed to register. As Playboy’s editor recognized perhaps better than
anyone, quenching inner desires comprised the logic of modern
American life. This powerful, expanding impulse of self-fulfillment
animated not only Hefners politics in this age of rebellion, but his
private life as well.

Ill

In some sense, the personal always had been the political for Hefner.
He had lived out his private rebellion against middle-class mores
since founding Playboy in 1953, personifying the pleasures of sex
and materialism that he believed had been stifled by a heritage of
Puritanism. American culture seemed to catch up with him by the
mid-1960s as middle-aged suburbanites reveled in consumerism and
relaxed sexual standards while youthful rebels threw restraint to the
winds and rejected most forms of authority. The Hefner Doctrine of
hedonism with a social conscience went mainstream, and the pub-
lishers private life reflected the search for self-fulfillment under way
in the permissive atmosphere of late 1960s America.

But the problem of Hefners legendary reclusiveness lingered.
Abundant publicity had informed the public about his isolation in
the mansion for months, if not years, at a time. Wired on dexies and
addicted to work as much as revelry, given to terrible eating hab-
its and scrupulously avoiding sunshine and exercise, Hefner had
become dangerously underweight and his teeth had begun bother-
ing him from massive, daily sugar doses in soft drinks. Nothing better
illustrated this peculiar exile than his comical initial visit to the new
Playboy Building. “The first time was in the middle of the night when
it was raining. I was out walking,” he ruefully told an interviewer.
“We’d laid out millions and I hadn’t yet wandered over, even though
it’s only a few blocks from the Mansion. It turned out the guard didn’t
know who I was — but he finally let me in.” 40

By early 1967, at age forty-two, pale and weighing a gaunt 135
pounds, Hefner was ready for a change. His 1966 trip to London,
and his observation of a new liberationist ethic sweeping through
America shortly thereafter, had inspired him to consider a change of
habit. “When a fellow moves into his forties, it’s time he takes stock
of his life, undergoes a reevaluation, and perhaps revamps things a

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MR. PLAYBOY

bit,” he told the Chicago Tribune. As he admitted to Time, “I finally
woke up to the fact that I had the world by the tail, and if I wanted
to enjoy it, I’d better start taking care of myself.” 41

He decided to act. In one of those bold transformations by which
he periodically altered his life, Hefner reinvented himself. He began
to sleep regularly and eat a healthier diet. Giving up amphetamines,
he embarked upon a moderate exercise routine — mostly on a slant
board and stationary bicycle — and gradually added thirty pounds
to his frame. “It’s part of a new image called living longer,” Hefner
told one magazine. Affected by the new sense of freedom sweep-
ing through men’s fashions, he also purchased a new wardrobe.
Abandoning the white shirts, restrained ties, and trim, dark-colored
business suits from earlier days, he hired a tailor and spent $10,000 on
a new Edwardian wardrobe of wide-lapeled, double-breasted suits,
colorful shirts, flashy ties, and leather overcoats, as well as Nehru
jackets and pendants. 42

He also decided to delegate more editorial responsibility at the
magazine to subordinates. As Playboy had expanded, the tasks
involved with overseeing its publication had grown enormously
and Hefner’s burden became backbreaking. He began turning over
more responsibilities to Art Director Art Paul, Photo Director Vince
Tajiri, and Editorial Director A. C. Spectorsky and his young asso-
ciate editors. Hefner explained his decision in terms of confronting
Frankenstein: “I found that I had built this marvelous machine, but far
from being master of that machine, the machine was ruling me.” 43

Thus Hefner, both physically and psychologically, left the cocoon
of the mansion and ventured out into the vibrant, experimental atmo-
sphere of the late 1960s. His own, personal sexual revolution became
central to this new engagement with the world. He had continued
to have sex with a variety of Playmates and Bunnies throughout the
mid-1960s, but now his encounters proliferated. He enjoyed flings
with “Personal Playmates” such as Cynthia Myers, Jill Tewksbury,
Gale Olson, and Carol Imhoff. He even had a brief affair with one of
his daughter’s teenage friends in late 1968. “When my more reclusive
Mansion years ended, they ended with a bang,” he recalled later.
“The number of my new sexual partners increased ten-fold that year
[1968] — from 4 to 40 — as I enthusiastically participated in the plea-
sures to be had in this sensual society.” 44

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223

In July 1968, while visiting Los Angeles, Hefner participated in
what he called a “Hollywood orgy that Cecil B. Demille would be
proud of.” About seventy Hollywood swingers came to his apart-
ment on Sunset Boulevard in an atmosphere resonating with sexual
adventurism. The result startled even Hefner:

The scene that night is not easy to describe. It began as a
very conventional cocktail party, but before long couples had
started fondling one another, pulling off their clothes, mak-
ing out on the couches, on the floor, in the living room, bed-
room, and bath. Couples turned into threesomes, foursomes,
moresomes — combinations that boggle the imagination. . . .

I’m right there in the middle of it all.

The next evening, a few friends came over to discuss the events
of the previous night. Suddenly, a strange couple came in, ordered
drinks, and began making out on the couch on the other side of the
room. “They’d been invited to the orgy, but got the date wrong,”
Hefner discovered. 45

Meanwhile, at the mansion, a vibrant new social scene flowered.
Large, boisterous parties had continued throughout the 1960s, of
course, but now they were invigorated by a new atmosphere of lib-
eration as well as Hefners actual participation. A long list of celeb-
rities from every walk of life frequented the festivities. On any
given night, one might encounter Bishop Pike and David Susskind,
astronaut Scott Carpenter and Mort Sahl, jockey Billy Hartog and
Johnny Carson, Woody Allen and Alistair Cooke, Danny Kaye and Vic
Damone, Michael Caine and Mel Torme, Wilt Chamberlain and
Steve McQueen, or dozens of others. 46

A high point in the new mansion social environment came on
February 23, 1968, when Hefner hosted “The Happening,” a grand
gathering devoted to the new psychedelic age. Dozens of guests
arrived dressed in the latest groovy garb — miniskirts, Nehru jackets,
fringed leather jackets, flowered shirts, love beads — and playfully
waved signs saying “Love,” “Charlie Brown for President,” “Flower
Power,” and “War Is Bad for Children and Other Living Things.” As
rock music from a live band blared through the house, dancers and
spectators alike were blanketed with a swirling, throbbing light show.

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MR. PLAYBOY

Playmates adorned with body paint roamed through the crowd, as
did a robed guru. Behind a large buffet table groaning with food sat
a sign reading “Psychedelicatessen.” 47

A coterie of male companions invigorated Hefners active new
life. The group included old friends Shel Silverstein, the cartoon-
ist, author, and songwriter; John Dante, former club owner and now
Playboy employee; plus Bill Cosby, the comedian and actor starring
in the television hit I Spy. The quartet spent much time hanging
out at the mansion, talking and joking, pursuing women, and play-
ing games into the early morning hours. They also ventured up to
Playboys new Wisconsin resort at Lake Geneva, which opened in
May 1968. This facility had been created as part of the company’s syn-
ergistic plan, aimed at the leisure needs of “affluent pleasure seekers”
with its fine restaurants and bars, stage shows, shops, game rooms,
twenty-five-acre lake, tennis courts, ski runs, and golf course. Hef
and his three buddies loved to fly up to the resort, catch a show, and
throw a party for the Bunnies and performers. 48

Hefner’s reemergence into the world also inspired a new television
project, Playboy After Dark. Shot at CBS studios in Los Angeles and
syndicated nationally, the show started taping in the summer of 1968.
Hefner had been inspired to reenter television as part of his personal
makeover. “The whole thing represented a change in lifestyle for me.
For the last several years I have been, well, a sort of recluse,” he told
the Los Angeles Times. “Now I’ll be spending every other week out
here taping the show.” 49

Like his first television project a decade earlier, Playboy After Dark
took the form of an apartment party hosted by Hefner. Presenting a
variety of singers, comedians, dancers, and celebrities, it adopted
a casual, personal tone and attempted, in Hefner’s words, to “use the
camera as a third person at our party.” It offered an entertainment
blend of old and new: comedians Jack E. Leonard and the Smothers
Brothers, musicians Buddy Bich and the Grateful Dead, filmmakers
Otto Preminger and Boman Polanski. Hefner was eager to display
the current interest in sexual liberation. “The Playboy Philosophy
advocating more permissive behavior in sex will be implicit in
the show,” he told Variety. “But we’ll do it in good taste and with
sophistication.” 50

Then Hefner fell in love. At the third taping of Playboy After Dark
on August 7, 1968, he met an eighteen-year-old UCLA coed named

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225

Barbara Klein, who was an extra. He was immediately struck by her
schoolgirl looks — button nose, large dark eyes and long dark hair, daz-
zling smile, purple miniskirt. According to Lee Wolfberg, who later
introduced them, when Hefner first spied her, it was “like a movie
scene, across a crowded room, he sees her and lights up like a light
bulb.” When she danced frenetically to the music of the guest band,
Iron Butterfly, “I almost fell out of my chair,” Hefner recalled later.
They shot another episode the next day, and he finally had a chance
to talk with the young beauty. He invited her to join him and a few
friends at a post-show jaunt through some Los Angeles discos, which
prompted a legendary quip. Klein said, “I’ve never dated anyone over
twenty-five.” “Thats okay,” Hefner replied. “Neither have I .” 51
That night, after slow-dancing with Klein to Herb Alpert’s hit song
“This Guys in Love with You,” Hefner began to fall for her. Klein, on
her part, found her suitor to be bright, funny, and charming, but was
worried that “he was old enough to be my father.” They had dinner
the next several evenings, went dancing, and concluded their dates in
dark corners of the clubs cuddling and smooching like teenage sweet-
hearts. “All of a sudden, he didn’t seem so old to me anymore,” said
the coed. Hefner admitted, “I hadn’t felt like this since high school.
I flew back to Chicago in a happy haze .” 52

Over the next several months, a smitten Hefner pursued Klein
relentlessly during his trips to Los Angeles. At first, a Playboy limou-
sine would pick her up at her dormitory, but as other students began
to buzz about the situation she decided to drive her own car to meet
the publisher. Klein became a regular on Playboy After Dark , increas-
ingly appearing on camera at Hefner’s side, and between segments
they would sit and hold hands. “It was very exciting for both of us.
I remember when he sent flowers to the dormitory. He sent so many
flowers that I was able to give one to every girl in the dormitory,” she
said. “It was all a new experience to be with somebody who knew how
to handle women. He really does make a woman feel special .” 53
In September, Klein accepted Hefner’s invitation to come to
Chicago, staying at the mansion and accompanying him to the Lake
Geneva resort. They spent much time kissing and petting but Klein
refused to give up her virginity. For her that meant total commit-
ment, and she was still unsure about the gap in age between them.
Hefner grew intensely frustrated by the situation, but he was so smit-
ten that patience triumphed over desire. He took the shocking step

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MR. PLAYBOY

of meeting her parents in Sacramento, then flew with her to Aspen
for a Christmas ski vacation, followed by a New Years celebration
in Las Vegas. The publishers friends were amazed at his ardent yet
restrained courtship. “He really romanced this lady,” noted Cosby. 54

This went on for months. Finally, on Valentine’s Day in 1969, the
two consummated their relationship on Hefner’s round, rotating bed
at the Chicago mansion. “The next thing I knew, we had done it,
and I was in shock,” Klein recalled. “I don’t even remember how
it was, I was so taken aback by the whole thing. I remember thinking
at the time, well, at least we’ve got that out of the way.” With her
inhibitions finally overcome, Klein threw herself into the relation-
ship and became the key figure in Hefner’s life. 55

She had an immediate impact on the publisher, inspiring a flurry
of travel that shocked his friends and associates. In February they
went to Acapulco with three other couples for a seaside vacation
where Hefner went parachute-sailing high over the bay even though
he couldn’t swim a stroke and didn’t like the water. They procured
some marijuana from the locals, got delightfully high, and spent
an evening giggling and gorging themselves on Kentucky Fried
Chicken. The following month the couple traveled to Hawaii, fol-
lowed by an early summer trip to Puerto Rico. When Klein got a
starring role in a movie, How Did a Nice Girl Like You Get into This
Business, Hefner accompanied her to Rome, Monte Carlo, Paris, and
London for several weeks of filming. At the publisher’s suggestion,
she changed her name to Rarbi Renton because it would look bet-
ter on a theater marquee. At a press conference, Hefner even went
public with his bliss: “I think I can say this is the first time I’ve ever
been in love.” 56

At home, Hefner displayed a new zest for activity in the com-
pany of his girlfriend, especially in California. They spent the day at
Disneyland, went bowling with Sonny and Cher, and even took up
tennis. “We used to play at public courts because we didn’t belong to
a club,” she explained. “We were about the same in terms of ability,
which was beginners, but sometimes we’d get to the court and have
to wait. . . . Can’t you just see Hef waiting in line? It was fun; we held
hands.” 57

Renton found the luxurious lifestyle to be an important part of the
Hefner appeal. Having grown up as a doctor’s daughter and accus-
tomed to the finer things in life, she appreciated that the house wine

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227

at the Playboy Mansion was Chateau Lafite Rothschild. “I was meant
to be a Jewish- American princess,” she admitted. “That was a lifestyle
a girl could get used to.” She also slid into the Playboy orbit and was
featured in a nine-page pictorial in 1970 titled “Barbi Doll.” Originally
reluctant to pose nude, she overcame her reservations because the
magazine “upholds really good taste.” Pursuing her career as a model,
toying with the idea of becoming a singer, and enjoying the atten-
tions of her famous boyfriend, Benton lived in the moment. “I really
honestly thought I’d probably only stay with Hef as long as we were
having fun,” she said. 58

Thus Hugh Hefner reached the height of happiness and influence
in the late 1960s. More widely read than ever before, Playboy was
shaping public opinion while his company was raking in tremendous
profits. His celebrity status had reached the top tier as America caught
up with, and celebrated, his advanced notions of pleasure-seeking
through sexual liberation and consumer enjoyment. His unabashed
liberal political crusading seemed to embody the spirit of this tumul-
tuous age. Finally, and no less importantly, he seemed to have found
the girl of his dreams.

But then Hefner, like the hero in a Greek tragedy warned of
hubris, was blindsided and knocked from his pedestal at the point
of his greatest triumph. Certain of his liberal allies grew troubled over
an issue becoming increasingly explosive in the radicalizing world of
late 1960s America. Many women had never been comfortable with
Playboy and its depiction of females, and now they sharpened their
weapons and went after its editor with a vengeance. Things would
never be quite the same.

What Do Women Want?

A t the end of the decade, 1960s social activism blew up in
Playboy’s face. In February 1969, during a talk by Bruce
Draper, the magazine s college promotion director, at Grinnell
College in Iowa, a cadre of protestors burst into the gathering. To
the astonishment of those present, about ten of the interlopers —
mostly females but including a few men — completely disrobed as
they shouted and waved signs reading “Liberated Women Are More
Fun” and “Playmeat of the Month.” Then they fanned out through
the audience, handing out fliers reading “We protest Playboy’s images
of lapdog female playthings and their junior-executive-on-the-way-up
possessors.” The protesters identified themselves as members of the
Grinnell Womens Liberation Group and the Guerrilla Theater. 1

This proved to be the opening salvo in a rapidly escalating war.
At Antioch College in Ohio, protestors disrupted Playboy photogra-
phers who were there to take pictures of new mens fashions. About
three hundred people chanted slogans, taunted the visitors, and took
their clothes off to protest the magazine’s “mindless flaunting of the
female body.” Even the Playboy Mansion became a target later that
year. At a benefit party for the ACLU hosted by Hefner, Mrs. Wayne

228

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

229

Parsons, a member of the organization s board of directors in Illinois,
expressed her disgust at Playboy by taping political flyers over valu-
able works of art hanging on the walls. As security men escorted her
out, she shouted that Hefner’s magazine “portrayed women as mere
sexual objects.” 2

In such agitated fashion, a highly emotional and divisive dispute
ensnared Hugh Hefner at the moment of his greatest success. Acolytes
of the womens liberation movement, one of the freedom-seeking
crusades emerging from the political ferment of the 1960s, put the
publisher and his magazine in the ideological crosshairs and pulled
the trigger. Hefner, they accused, was an exploiter of women. The
publisher, who saw himself as a great emancipator, felt a profound
sense of betrayal as a growing segment of the left began portraying
him as an agent of oppression. The controversy escalated into full-
scale conflict that occasionally waned but never disappeared. It would
plague him for the rest of his career.

Up to this point, Hefner had been at the center of several great
social transformations that remade post-World War II America: the
sexual, consumer, and media revolutions. Now another great wave
of social change — the movement for womens rights — threatened to
engulf the Playboy ship and capsize it. But the issues proved to be as
complicated as they were emotional. Hefner s and Playboy’s attitude
toward, and role in, the struggle for women’s rights proved less
salutary than the publisher would ever admit, but also less incrimi-
nating than his feminist critics claimed. The situation overwhelmed
simplistic attacks and defenses and ultimately, as with just about
everything else in his career, it focused on sex. Moreover, it involved
an evolution of ideas and attitudes about women’s role in society, as
Hefner and his magazine changed from the 1950s to the 1970s. The
same held true for the vast majority of Americans, and his story, like
theirs, revealed much about a difficult sea change in modern social
and cultural values.

In the 1950s, women were assigned a particularly important place in
the structure of American society. After the enormous dislocations
in personal life caused by the Great Depression and World War II,

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the postwar era repositioned women at the center of a revitalized
domestic ideal. The traditional family reemerged with renewed vigor
as women assumed positions as stewards of large, “baby boomer”
families and domestic managers of increasingly affluent households.
Awash in a consumer bonanza, urban and suburban families became
hubs of what one historian has termed “domestic containment” —
stable entities that cultivated sound values and nourished security
as part of a larger ideological struggle. In the postwar definition of
femininity, it became womens civic duty to sustain the family as a
bulwark of the American Way of Life in the struggle with a hostile
communist foe. 3

But social and economic developments soon placed enormous new
pressures on female domesticity. First, women entered the workforce
in unprecedented numbers to help support Americas growing con-
sumer tastes, and by 1960 roughly 30 percent of American wives
were laboring for wages. They faced inequalities in pay, however,
and, if married, a growing burden from piling housework on top of an
outside job. Second, young women attended college in growing num-
bers after World War II and the notion of careers outside the home
took root. Third, as the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the
Human Female made clear in 1953, restrictions on female sexuality
appeared to be loosening in postwar society, a trend that accelerated
rapidly with the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960. Finally,
from within the confines of the idealized American home, a slow-
simmering discontent began to emerge among many women who felt
trapped by an endless round of childcare duties, PTA meetings, shop-
ping, and housecleaning. Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique
(1963), famously described this sense of frustration as “the problem
that has no name.” In other words, many women ensconced in the
American home were growing restless by the early 1960s. 4

Playboy, of course, emerged precisely during this period. Over
its first decade, from the early 1950s through the early 1960s, the
magazine reflected both the dominant expectations and the growing
discontent regarding women’s position in postwar America. Hefner
upheld certain long-standing attitudes about males and females, but
he disrupted others. Partly by design, but largely by accident, he
helped set the stage for a revolution in attitudes about women.

Playboy presented itself as a strident opponent of the 1950s
domestic ideal. It called for a loosening of the model of middle-class

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

231

conformity binding young women (as well as young men) and
applauded the notion that they should postpone marriage, work for
a time, and explore the world before settling into motherhood and
family. The magazine also contended that females should be freed
from “Puritanism” and allowed to experience erotic pleasure just like
their male counterparts. In other words, women should be liberated
for sex.

Playboy’s Playmate of the Month typified this message. She
represented not only the girl next door who demonstrated that “nice
girls enjoy sex, too,” as Hefner liked to put it, but the adventurous
female who had left the neighborhood to experience the world. The
Playmate embodied, literally, the notion of the liberated young woman
who stood outside marriage and motherhood as a student, stewardess,
model, secretary, or librarian. So did the popular cartoon series Babs
and Shirley, which humorously portrayed two single, working young
women who shared an apartment as well as a spirit of carefree sexual
freedom. A typical cartoon pictured the two bachelorettes sprawled
on the sofa chatting, as Shirley observed, “Ordinarily I never chase
after a man, Babs, but this one was getting away .” 5

In many public statements, Hefner maintained that a healthy
society encouraged a robust female sexuality. Playboy’s ideal of “full-
figured, fresh faced . . . natural female beauty” protected against the
identity confusions of an “asexual society.” Moreover, the magazine
promoted the notion of sex with no strings attached. In embracing
this fantasy, many young men sharpened a tendency to see females
mainly as sexual prey. Throughout Playboy’s first decade of existence,
women usually appeared as attractive creatures who were fair game
for the wiles of seduction. In part, of course, this scenario updated the
erotic game of enticement and pursuit between men and women that
was as old as humankind. But it also encouraged men to see women
primarily as sexually alluring creatures to be bedded and enjoyed
serially . 6

This attitude toward women appeared consistently in the early
years of Playboy. In a playful series of pieces on “how to succeed
with women without really trying,” Shepherd Mead urged young
men to play the field and avoid hasty marriage. “You can have only
one wife at a time, but the bachelor can be surrounded by girls of all
kinds,” he joked. “Surround yourself.” He suggested ploys for break-
ing marital engagements: “I’m afraid of us, Ethel.” “Of us, Davie?”

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MR. PLAYBOY

“Of our passions. Burn us both to ashes.” Another version surfaced
in “The Playboy Coloring Book,” a satire that presented line
sketches and directions as if to a child poised with a box of crayons.
One said, “Here is the playboy with his two favorite toys. The one
on the left is called a sports car. Color it fast. The one on the right is
called a playmate. Color her pretty.” On another page: “This is the
playboys office. . . . The playboys secretary cannot type, or spell, or
take shorthand. Color her hair yellow, and her eyes green, and her
lips red, but leave her mind blank.” At another point: “These are extra
playmates. ... It does not matter which is which. The girls’ hair colors
are interchangeable. So are the girls.” 7

Playboy , like nearly everyone else in 1950s America, also upheld
the primacy of men in society. It defended male dominance in the
workplace, arguing that single women should take jobs but avoid
“competing” with men for plum positions. If the young womans place
was not necessarily in the home, neither was it in the executive suite.
As Shepherd Mead half-jested, “The woman executive must not be
allowed to spring up — and, once having sprung up, must be sup-
pressed as quickly as possible.” Married women also were expected
to know their place. An advertisement in Playboy for “The Pink
Pedestal” offered a certificate with an illustration of a woman in
ancient garb standing atop a classical column holding a broom. “Put
the little woman in her place,” read the text, and give her this award
“that shows your appreciation of her daily slaving. Personalized with
her name. A constant source of inspiration on kitchen or laundry-
room wall.” “I guess we do express an antifeminist point of view, and
we might be somewhat in error in not giving the exceptional woman
full credit,” Victor Lownes told the Saturday Evening Post in 1962.
“But we firmly believe that women are not equal to men.” 8

Hefner agreed that gender roles went “back to the very beginning
of time. The man goes out and kills a saber-toothed tiger while the
woman stays at home and washes out the pots. Fair, unfair, good, bad,
or indifferent, the roles were clearly defined.” He asserted, “No sane
woman would really want equality. . . . There are an endless number
of special advantages, considerations, courtesies, laws that protect
womankind. They would no more want to do without these than the
man in the moon.” As he explained to a friend, “If playboy some-
times seems to be saying that women belong in the bedroom and not
in the office, it is because so many publications are trying to divest

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

233

women of all natural womanly charms, to make them competitive
with, and almost indistinguishable from, men.” 9

In fact, Playboy and Hefner frequently raised the alarm against
the danger of growing female power. Throughout the 1950s and early
1960s, the magazine often portrayed women as grasping, competi-
tive, and dominating as they appropriated power in the home and
secured growing leverage in the consumer marketplace. Men, the
magazine warned, needed to assert their position before they became
completely emasculated.

In its very first issue, Playboy warned against gold-digging women
who manipulated the divorce system to keep them in the high life.
“All-American womanhood has descended on alimony as a natural
heritage,” it said. “Even the simplest wench can make a handsome
living today.” In subsequent years, it exposed additional schemes con-
cocted by domineering women, such as the manipulation of language:
“Femalese: ‘Oh dear, I feel so foolish, coming out without my purse
this way.’ Translation: ‘Out with the wallet, sweetheart, and hold
still — this won’t hurt a bit.’” Another lamented the disappearance
of the old-fashioned “all-girl girl” in the face of newer, more aggres-
sive types. This older ideal “never permitted a few belated civil liber-
ties to transform her into a Susan B. Anthony Memorial Shrew.” 10

Playboy s early crusade against overweening women reached its
apex in a series of biting articles from Philip Wylie. This controver-
sial journalist and novelist had first gained attention with Generation
of Vipers (1942), a vitriolic best-seller that attacked “Momism.”
Modern mothers, he accused, were typically cloying, manipulative
shrews who weakened American society by browbeating their hus-
bands and sissifying their sons. Now Wylie penned several pieces
in Hefner’s magazine that denounced more generally the sway of
modern females. In “The Abdicating Male” (1956), Wylie claimed
that women had captured “more than 80% of America’s buying,” a
trend mercilessly manipulated by Madison Avenue and shamefully
accepted by stifled men. In “The Womanization of America” (1958),
he decried a modern “taffeta tide” that was flooding over social
clubs, teaching, entertainment, and the arts. When men had granted
female rights and emancipation, he argued, women took advantage
because “to them equality meant the tyrant’s throne.” In “The Career
Woman” (1963), Wylie took special aim at females — “perfumed
pirates,” “girl-guillotiners,” “she-tycoons” — who were invading

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MR. PLAYBOY

business management and the professions. This type represented
an “obscene compulsion: she must compete with and, if necessary,
cripple manhood and masculinity on earth.” 11

In 1962, Playboy gathered eight spokesmen for a Playboy Panel
on Wylie’s “The Womanization of America.” “In many ways, womens
meteoric ascendancy has been entirely laudable; we are not male
chauvinists,” Playboy professed at the outset. But it also claimed
that “women are being masculinized even faster than the country is
being womanized. Or is it, perhaps, that men are being effeminized?”
Most of the panel endorsed this view. Two commentators described
womens growing influence as a healthy move toward equality, but
the others agreed with Norman Mailer, who contended that “women
are becoming more selfish, more greedy, less romantic, less warm,
more lusty, and more filled with hate.” As Alexander King, playwright
and Life editor, observed, “I haven’t the slightest doubt that this abso-
lute, unquestioned equality [of women] is a great mistake and in vio-
lation of all natural laws. It is a mistake because democracy is all right
politically, but it’s no good in the home.” 12

Like the panel, Hefner endorsed Wylie’s “womanization” thesis. He
complained about the modern “submergence of the male” beneath
a growing female authority and linked Playboy ’ s success to a male
reaction against the threat of “a female-oriented society.” He criti-
cized women’s influence in magazines, movies, and television with
its “castrated, female view of life — one example out of many of the
growing womanization of America.” His rallying cry: “We think it’s a
man’s world, or should be.” 13

Hefner fully aired his resentment of female domination, and the
need for a reassertion of male authority, in a 1962 radio program:

In the last 20 or 30 years, we have a female dominated and
oriented society, with the roles of man and woman so similar
that it is now quite difficult for a woman to discover exactly
what her real identity is, or a man, either. We’ve wound up
with an almost asexual society, with women competing with
men instead of complementing them. ... I mean, it’s sick!
Now, we think women are the most wonderful thing in the
world. But we think they should be women. . . .

For Playboy, the roles of the sexes are clearly defined.
Society remains essentially masculine. Otherwise, neither men

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

235

nor women know exactly whats expected of them in personal
relations or in life. You’ll note that our girls in Playboy are
called “Playmates” . . . and they complement and suit a man
and his needs. And in the process, of course, they fulfill their
own needs and desires. Have you ever known a really happy
woman who was domineering and competitive? I haven’t. 14

In a 1962 television panel, Hefner confronted the issue of gen-
der equality. There was no distinction between the sexes in terms of
“all the important intellects and capacities,” he granted, but problems
arose when women abandoned complementary roles. Females’ com-
petitive capacities lagged, as even a quick survey of great writers, art-
ists, actors, and scientists revealed. “Granting Sands and the Bronte
sisters and Elizabeth Barrett Browning — do these few names compare,
either in size or stature, with Shakespeare, Shaw, Poe, Hemingway,
Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Melville, Ibsen?” he argued. “Against Madame
Curie you’ve got to place Pasteur, Darwin, Galileo, Newton, Edison,
Einstein. It’s like putting Grandma Moses in with Picasso, Van Gogh,
Benoir, Gauguin, and Matisse.” Hefner drew a clear conclusion: “If a
woman is, bit by bit, denouncing her own femininity, then she is moving,
step by step it seems to me, towards a denial of her own person.” 15
Thus two contrary impulses regarding women vied with one
another in the world of Playboy from the 1950s to the early 1960s.
First, Hefner and his magazine sought to restrict females to “com-
plementary” roles in American society, welcoming them into the
workplace as long as they did not threaten male jobs and prestige.
This position, of course, reflected mainstream opinion in this pre-
feminist era. Second, Playboy campaigned to liberate young women
from domestic roles to enjoy sexual pleasures long denied them by
traditional American morality. Here Hefner’s publication articulated
a position that undermined orthodox values in far-reaching ways. This
ambiguity reflected the first strains of a massive shift in sensibility
regarding women’s roles in modern society as Hefner, like his fellow
citizens, entered unfamiliar territory.

But notions of polite debate about the proper place for women in
modern America soon crumbled. As the 1960s unfolded, opponents
of Playboy grew increasingly outraged by its images of women and
mobilized their forces for attack. An exchange of views disappeared
in a cacophony of accusation and recrimination.

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MR. PLAYBOY

In the spring of 1970, during two appearances on the nationally
televised Dick Cavett Show, Hefner felt the full impact of femi-
nist fury. The first segment placed him alongside the activists Susan
Brownmiller and Sally Kempton to discuss the new movement for
womens liberation. In Kempton’s blunt assessment, men “oppress
us as women. And Hugh Hefner is my enemy.” He tried to be
conciliatory, blaming religion for the oppression of women and con-
tending that Playboy had supported women’s rights by endorsing
equal job opportunities and abortion rights. The real progressive goal,
he maintained, was to expand “human rights” for women and men.
Brownmiller retorted scornfully that she would believe that “on the
day that you are willing to come out here with a cotton tail attached
to your rear end.” An audience laced with supporters applauded and
cheered. 16

A few weeks later, a second segment moved from the conten-
tious to the riotous. This time Hefner confronted the feminists Holly
Tannen and Diane Crothers. He goaded them with the term “lib
ladies” and condemned “militant womens lib, which I find anti-
feminine and anti-sexual.” His antagonists returned fire. Crothers
and Tannen denounced Playboy for presenting women as “mindless
sex objects” who were expected to serve men while “looking incred-
ibly nineteen forever.” Hefner retorted that radical feminists simply
endorsed the old prejudice that “if a woman is beautiful then she is
brainless.” Playboy, he declared, “exploits sex like Sports Illustrated
exploits sports.” Then things got out of hand. Several dozen feminists
in the audience began shouting, “We’re oppressed people,” “This
is a fascist country,” “We are here to demand reparation.” Two of
them stormed the stage yelling “Fascist” and “Off the pig” before
security officers escorted them from the studio. An angry Cavett
declared, “We have two representatives of your movement up here.
Now if you don’t want to let them talk, get the hell out of here.” 17

Such confrontations revealed the intense emotion suffusing dis-
cussions of Playboy and women’s rights by the end of the 1960s. The
liberationist movements of that decade, which Hefner had embraced,
now seemed like a Pandora’s box as a horde of activists turned on their
benefactor. Hostile encounters became frequent as feminists bom-
barded Hefner and his magazine with fusillades of pent-up hatred

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

237

at every opportunity. This campaign, however, had been gathering
force for several years. It first had established a beachhead in the
early 1960s when a young female journalist had infiltrated the world
of the Playboy Clubs and written an expose.

Gloria Steinem was a bright, ambitious freelance journalist in New
York City in 1963 when she accepted an assignment from Show, an
arts and culture magazine, to go undercover at the New York City
Playboy Club and write about her experience. She secured a posi-
tion as a Bunny and worked at the club for several weeks. “A Bunnys
Tale” appeared in two parts in the May and June issues, and its scath-
ing account of women in the Playboy world raised themes that would
fuel the feminist attack for years. 18

Written in the form of a daily diary, Steinem s article offered no
breathtaking revelations or scandals about life inside the Playboy
Clubs. Instead, in an understated, detailed style she characterized a
Bunny’s work as degrading drudgery. Steinem portrayed the Bunnies
as cinching one another into excruciatingly tight outfits while stuffing
the ample bosom cavity with any material they could get their hands
on — gym socks, plastic bags, foam rubber, silk scarves, absorbent
cotton, and many others — to meet the Playboy ideal. She denounced
a system of rules that made Bunnies pay a daily fee for cleaning
and upkeep of their outfits, forbade them from sitting, and awarded
demerits for messy hair, coming back late from a break, or address-
ing the room director by his first name. She condemned guidelines
from the Playboy Club Bunny Manual — “You should make it seem
that the customer’s opinions are very important” or “Always remem-
ber, your proudest possession is your Bunny Tail. You must make
sure it is white and fluffy” — as demeaning. But most importantly
for an emerging feminist critique, Steinem asserted that Bunnies
were overworked and underpaid, earning far less than the advertised
$200 a week. She claimed that Bunnies worked long hours with few
breaks and little food for a meager paycheck of $108 to $145 a week.
This accusation touched a nerve as working women were beginning
to resent unequal pay, unfair treatment, and stifled opportunity. 19

Steinem also raised another issue — sexual objectification and
harassment — that would become central to an emerging feminist cri-
tique. Her work stint in the Playboy Club, she maintained, consisted
of an endless round of sexual abasement. She claimed that club man-
agers expected her to accompany Number One Keyholders — Playboy

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MR. PLAYBOY

executives, VIPs, influential media members — when they were in the
club and date them if asked. She contended that male customers
directed a constant stream of salacious comments, sexual innuendo,
and lewd propositions her way: patrons handed her keys to their hotel
rooms, leeringly asked her to serve drinks at a “private” party, or
queried, “If you’re my bunny, can I take you home with me?” She
asserted that many of the Bunnies bought into their own exploitation,
quoting one who praised a customer because he “he treats you just
the same whether you’ve slept with him or not.” Steinem offered a
melodramatic conclusion. Upon leaving after a work shift, she saw a
hooker sitting in a car. “She looked at me and smiled. I smiled back.
She looked available and was. Of the two of us, she seemed the more
honest .” 20

Many Bunnies were outraged by Steinem’s depiction of their
labors as sordid and financially unrewarding. They insisted that
their positions in the Playboy Clubs provided not only respectable
pay and a taste of glamour for ambitious young women, but also a
foundation for their later successes as business owners, entertainers,
and physicians. To many of them, Steinem was an elitist with a politi-
cal agenda. “The fact was, Gloria Steinem couldn’t identify with the
rest of us and didn’t care to,” wrote one. “At that point in her life, she
would never have considered working as a waitress, let alone a wait-
ress with Bunny ears, except as research for an article. Her viewpoint
was that of ... a privileged professional.” Deborah Harry, a Bunny
turned rock star, described her life in the club as “a rare combination
of women in the workplace — beauty, femininity, sexuality, and at the
same time, ambition and intelligence.” Lauren Hutton, the future
supermodel, described her sister Bunnies as “pre-feminist pioneers
and extraordinarily brave for the time. . . . We were like sisters learn-
ing together how to take charge of our own lives .” 21

Moreover, Steinem herself displayed considerable ambiva-
lence regarding feminist issues in this period. She wrote for Vogue,
Glamour, and Ladies’ Home Journal, not exactly progressive bea-
cons for women, and recently had published The Beach Book, which
extolled oceanside fantasies about Cary Grant and martinis, Aristotle
Onassis’s yacht, and sunbathing. Interestingly, she also had engaged
in a mild flirtation with Hefner himself. Put in touch by a mutual
friend, they tried unsuccessfully to meet up in New York City and
Hefner sent a note of dismay over having missed her. “There’s the

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

239

possibility that I should leave things as intriguing and mysterious as
they are. Nothing you can say, as a novelist friend once pointed out
to me, is nearly as good as what the readers will imagine,” Steinem
wrote back. “Still, I would like to meet you sometime when you’re in
town, so I’ll take the chance and to hell with the novelist.” 22

By the mid-1960s, dissenting voices were growing louder in
denouncing women’s second-class status in American society.
Complaints mounted about discrimination and inequities in the work-
place, restricted opportunities, and sexual exploitation. Critics had
begun blasting Playboy for portraying women as one-dimensional
sexual playthings. Cosmopolitan accused Hefner’s magazine of pro-
moting the view that women served as “an accessory for the well-
dressed bachelor. Of course, she is discarded when she reaches age
twenty-five, or before that, if she exhibits any intelligence.” Life took
a similar tack: “In Hefnerland, a woman is simply another aspect of
the status-symbol mania that is stamped all over Playboy. She is no
more or less important than the sleekest sports car or the most expen-
sive bottle of Scotch.” A sarcastic article in Mademoiselle contended
that real women were attracted by a man’s mind, character, and “faith
in some values beyond the latest Italian cut in tuxedos.” 23

Hefner reacted calmly, if defensively, to such criticism. He
moderated his earlier views, dropping complaints about womaniza-
tion and stressing that Playboy’s crusade for sexual liberation had
released women from their real oppressors — a religious heritage
that repressed their sexuality and made them chattel. “It is odd how
many feminists fail utterly to understand the extent to which the
emancipation of women and the sexual emancipation go together,”
he explained in 1966. “Historically, the idea of women remaining
chaste while men philander freely obviously stems from the notion
that they are chattel, and that used property is not as good as unused
property; and this idea is one that Playboy vigorously opposes.” 24
By 1968, however, Hefner had grown testy in the face of grow-
ing attacks. He complained that some women were so consumed
by their grievances that they had lost sight of how the sexes “have
everything to offer each other.” When asked if he was ever attracted
to a woman who was smarter than he was, he snapped, “I never met
a woman who was my intellectual superior. The most intellectu-
ally stimulating people are not women, they’re men.” He described
protesters against Playboy as “ridiculous” and insisted that “sexual

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MR. PLAYBOY

liberation is a major part of female emancipation,” he said. “I think
Playboy has done more for that than just about anyone.” 25

Meanwhile, Playboy adopted a two-part strategy in dealing with
feminist critics. First, it sidestepped them by defining the modem
woman as seeking a new lifestyle based on freedom and fun. “The
New Girl,” for example, described a fresh type of “postfeminist”
young woman who embraced an active life of “sexual freedom and
psychedelics, skindiving and the swim, Bobby Kennedy and Bobby
Dylan, the New Left and Civil Bights.” A photo and text article on
“The No-Bra Look” argued that this trend combined “both a feminist
rallying cry and a chic contemporary fashion trend.” A piece on “The
Abortion Revolution” argued that obsolete laws against terminating
pregnancy should be abolished in the name of female freedom. 26

Second, the magazine positioned itself as an advocate of womens
rights but an opponent of radical womens liberation. In a long state-
ment in 1970, the magazine clarified its stance:

Though we are opposed to the destructive radicalism and the
anti-sexuality of the extremist fringe of militant feminism, our
position on womens rights, we feel, is as consistently liberal
as our position on all human rights. We’ve been crusading
for a long time for universal availability of contraceptives and
birth control information, as well as for the repeal of restric-
tive abortion laws; we believe a womans right to control her
own body, in sexuality and in reproduction, is an essential
step toward greater personal freedom. Likewise, we reject the
Victorian double standard, which applauds sexual experience
in men and condemns it in women. . . . We are also opposed
to the traditional stereotype that relegates women to domestic
drudgery. We certainly believe that any woman who wants to
shun the homemaker’s role for a career, or who wants to com-
bine both, should have the opportunity. ... It should be need-
less to add that we believe women ought to be given equal pay
for work of equal value. 27

Strident feminists, however, branded Hefner and Playboy as the
supreme symbols of male oppression of women. Campus demon-
strations flared up, as in April 1970 at the University of Southern
California where a group of activists carried signs reading “We Won’t

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

241

Take Playboy Lying Down,” heckled a magazine spokesman during a
talk, and finally rushed the auditorium stage and tried to take over the
microphone. Ti-Grace Atkinson, a prominent feminist, gave speeches
describing Playboy as “middle-class pornography. We all know Hugh
Hefner is a pig.” Militants picketed the Playboy Club in Boston and
demanded that Bunnies come out for consciousness-raising discus-
sions. The manager refused, saying, “I think you’ll agree they’re not
exactly dressed for the occasion.” 28

A dramatic moment came when Gloria Steinem arrived at the
Chicago mansion in 1970 to interview Hefner for McCalls. They
clashed immediately. Her article, titled “What Playboy Doesn’t
Know About Women Could Fill a Book,” mocked the publication
as a 1950s relic peddling fake 1960s progressivism. Steinem, by
now a leading feminist, laid into the publisher in the best New Left
style, accusing him of promoting a shallow, retrograde consumer-
ism that made women into another commodity like liquor, hi-fi sets,
and sports cars. Hefner disagreed strenuously, defending his belief
in “capitalism with a social conscience,” women’s rights, and sexual
freedom for males and females. As the two sparred over female
images in Hefner’s magazine, Steinem declared, “There are times
when a woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi
manual.” He heatedly retorted, “I think the militant feminists want
to be men.” 29

Finally, Hefner struck back at his political tormenters. At his
instigation, Playboy solicited an article on feminism and approached
the freelance writer Susan Braudy. She joked that she wanted to
write such a compelling piece that the Playboy editors would soon be
“renaming their magazine Play People.” Her original draft analyzed
the women’s liberation movement and argued that stereotypes for
both sexes were breaking down under the impact of feminism. The
magazine accepted the piece but asked for revisions that stressed
the differences between “the radical crazies and the moderates.”
Then Hefner demanded a stronger critique of militant feminism.
When Braudy refused to make wholesale changes, Playboy killed
the article while paying her the writer’s fee. The magazine then
reassigned the project to Morton Hunt, who presented “Up Against
the Wall, Chauvinist Pig!” in the May 1970 issue. It recapitulated the
main lines of Hefner’s critique: while progressives agreed on end-
ing discrimination in terms of legal rights, workplace equity, and

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MR. PLAYBOY

sexual freedom, these proper reforms were being overshadowed by
“militant man-haters who do their level best to distort the distinctions
between male and female and to discredit the legitimate grievances
of American women.” 30

Just as the Hunt article was about to appear, controversy exploded.
On April 15, 1970, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee held a fund-
raiser at the Playboy Mansion, but as the guests arrived, they were
greeted by some three hundred anti -Playboy protesters organized by
the Chicago Womens Liberation Union. The picketers waved signs
reading “Peace, Not Piece” and “Sign Your Check But Don’t Go In,”
and jeered at guests who entered the house of “sexploitation.” Several
dozen police arrived to cordon off the entrance and ended up arrest-
ing several of the protesters. Inside, against a backdrop of antiwar
speechmaking, traumatized liberals compared notes on running the
gauntlet outside. “I’ve crossed picket lines before, but never one as
vicious as that,” said Rod Serling. “I felt like I was walking into the
Twilight Zone.” Then Shelly Schlicker, a secretary at Playboy, began
to loudly criticize the magazine and its attitude toward women. As
reporters gathered around, she complained that the upcoming Hunt
article “puts down women’s lib” and that two secretaries had been
dismissed for refusing to type it. “I’ll probably get fired for saying all
this,” she added. 31

A few days later, Schlicker secretly copied and released to the
press the in-house Hefner memo that had fueled the Hunt article. Its
heated reaction to the original Braudy piece revealed the publisher’s
state of mind:

[W]hat we have is a well-balanced, objective article, but what
I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists
apart. . . . What I’m interested in is the highly irrational, emo-
tional, kookie trend that feminism has taken in the last couple
of years. . . . These chicks are our natural enemy. It is time to
do battle with them. . . .

We certainly agree that a woman’s place is not in the home,
that a woman should enjoy a career. . . . But the militant
feminists want much more than this — essentially she wants to
play a role exactly comparable to the male’s, to compete with
him not simply in the business world but emotionally, and in
every other way. The only subject related to feminism that is

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

243

worth doing is on this new militant phenomenon and the only
proper playboy approach is one that devastates it . 32

An uproar ensued. Playboy fired Schlicker for publicly circulating
a confidential corporate communication, and she responded by join-
ing feminist groups to protest outside the Playboy Building. Raising a
clenched fist for television cameras, she declared, “I am joining with
my sisters to fight Hugh Hefner, Playboy, and everything they stand
for. . . . We will no longer sell ourselves in return for a pair of ears and
a tail and a condescending pat on the behind.” As Newsweek noted,
while Hefner refused to retract anything, he was “surely hunkering
down in anticipation of even more trouble.” 33

The infamous memo cemented Hefner s reputation among wom-
en’s liberationists as the Antichrist. Playboy later would provide a
forum to feminist critics such as Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan,
but the hostility remained. Hefner felt hurt, even betrayed by this
vilification. Knowing that Playboy had carried the flag for progressive
reform in behalf of civil rights, disengagement in Vietnam, and sexual
liberation, he could not fathom why many liberals now branded him
a villain. “Playboys been on the side of humanity and reason in all
the causes that are important, so you’d think that female emancipa-
tors would separate their friends from their enemies,” he asserted
in 1969. 34

But Hefners public pronouncements on feminism provided only
one perspective on his views of women. His private experiences
offered another. As much as any debating points in public exchanges,
the nature of his close relationships with females over the first four
decades of his life revealed much about his attitude toward women
and their place in society.

Ill

Hefners understanding of women had taken root during his boy-
hood in rather barren emotional soil. He had imbibed emotional
repression from his mother, Grace, who had withheld affection even
as she indulged most of his whims. At the same time, through an
addiction to the movies and popular music, he absorbed exaggerated
notions of female beauty and highly sentimental notions of romance.

244

MR. PLAYBOY

Then during late adolescence, he had been stunned when Millie
Williams, his fiancee, betrayed him by having a sexual affair with
a coworker. Hefner never got over these youthful influences. He
reached adulthood with a complex, ambivalent view of women and
their motives and inclinations. It was in equal parts adoring and sus-
picious, loving and manipulative, lusty and resentful. He relentlessly
pursued and bedded women as the sweet side of his nature searched
for “a place where the lyrics to the songs are true,” as he often
described, yet the controlling side sought to keep the upper hand
emotionally. At some level, he was aware of these internal conflicts,
once telling an interviewer that “intellectually, I may think in a cer-
tain way; practically, I may act in another way. ... I am and I remain
a combination of incoherences that I uselessly try to reject.” 35
This ambiguous sensibility shaped Hefner s lifelong habit of estab-
lishing relationships with much younger women. From Betty Zuziak
and Joyce Nizzari in the 1950s to Cynthia Maddox and Mary Warren
in the 1960s and Barbi Benton in the late 1960s (not to mention
countless others for shorter duration), he gravitated toward beautiful
females in their early twenties. In one sense, this impulse expressed
the mysterious compulsion of male lust and the unique opportunities
for venting it that appeared in the Playboy world. But the attrac-
tion to young women also met deeper emotional needs. On the one
hand, they provided the publisher a strong dose of nonthreatening
affection that made his world seem warm and safe. On the other
hand, their youthful inexperience allowed him to maintain emotional
control. Hefner expressed this ambivalent urge perfectly in a 1966
interview. “I pick good-looking, young girls because I get something
very good out of the innocence and sweetness that exists at that level,”
he admitted, then added a revealing addendum: “Most of the girls
I have gone out with have benefited because I give them an identity
and, when they come out of the machine, they are better for it.” 36
This sensibility also led Hefner to avoid involvement not with
smart women, as his critics often accused, but accomplished ones. “I
don’t feel uncomfortable with an intelligent woman. Simply, I do not
know what to do with her,” he confessed. The publisher wanted to
adore and protect women, and to enjoy their devotion in return, while
pitting himself against men. He perceived males in terms of intellec-
tual stimulation and competitive accomplishment, saw females as
sources of affection and love, and grew uncomfortable when either

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

245

gender transcended those familiar confines. “In a lot of ways, I’m a
very dominant guy and am attracted to a very feminine, submissive
kind of woman. The truly competitive female leaves me cold,” he
noted in 1968. Thus women who sought to be like men — such as
militant feminists, in his perception — turned his emotional universe
on its head. As he told an interviewer, “It’s not brains that turns me
off a girl; it’s that emotionally castrating thing.” 37

Hefners internal impulses also made him a firm believer in the
double standard. While he proclaimed that the sexual revolution had
liberated women for sexual experiences just like men, his actions
fell short of his words. As Cynthia Maddox described, “Of course,
I was always theoretically free to do as I pleased, but I abided by
TTef s rules. If I was on a date with another boy, heaven help me if
he even kissed me.” Hefner admitted that while he wanted to play
around, when his girlfriends did so “I was rather hurt.” He blamed
his upbringing for the hypocrisy. “You know, I still have some of the
Puritan heritage that I grew up with. There are gaps between what
I intellectually believe in and the man I am,” he admitted in the late
1960s. “I’m afraid I believe in a double-standard for men and women
in actual situations far more than I want to admit.” 38

Thus for Hefner the traditionalist, affectionate and attractive
young women provided companionship, fun, and sexual satisfaction
and would adapt to the contours of his life. They would be bright
enough to be interesting, but not so accomplished as to threaten his
domination of the relationship. They would remain sexually true to
him, while he retained the option of sleeping with others. This repre-
sented, of course, a heightened version of mainstream male attitudes
toward women in a pre-feminist age: women were expected to sup-
port and “complement” men. Hefner, like almost all American males,
struggled to accommodate new notions of female equality.

But for Hefner the rebel, sex moved front and center stage. The
issue of the “sexual objectification” of women became the divid-
ing line as feminist critics insisted that Playboy reduced women to
objects of physical desire and downplayed their intelligence, char-
acter, and achievements. Hefner disagreed passionately. “Playboy
treats women — and men, too, for that matter — as sexual beings, not
as sexual objects,” he countered, and the cause of sexual liberation
“helped women step down from their pedestals and enjoy their natu-
ral sexuality as much as men.” He denied portraying women as a kind

246

MR. PLAYBOY

of consumer item, like a sports car or fine wine. “Far from being an
accessory to the good life, women — and the romantic liaison between
them and our male readers — are the very point and purpose of what
Playboy espouses as a guide for living,” he insisted. 39

There seemed to be little common ground for understanding
between Hefner and his feminist foes. But a broader historical per-
spective suggests otherwise. The antagonists — caught up in a profound
transformation that reached to fundamental questions of status, biol-
ogy, identity, and social organization — shared more than they knew in
laboring to direct and grasp this sea change. Their common struggle
illuminated several historical issues.

First, Playboy and the feminist movement worked in tandem to
undermine the domestic, suburban “family togetherness” model of
1950s America. The noted feminist Barbara Ehrenreich accused
Hefner of employing the rhetoric of sexual revolution to mask his real
goal: encouraging men to abandon marriage and family in a “flight
from commitment.” This argument, however, overlooks the fact that
Betty Friedan, and many other feminists, focused on a similar target.
The Feminine Mystique maintained that women had been imprisoned
in the American home by the demands of childrearing, homemak-
ing, and marriage. Unhappy, anxious, even depressed, they desper-
ately sought escape from this “comfortable concentration camp.” In
this goal, Playboy and feminism shared more than either would ever
admit. 40

Moreover, both Playboy and modern feminism were part of
a larger crusade promoting an ethos of self-fulfillment in modern
America. Since the early decades of the twentieth century, main-
stream culture had steadily jettisoned traditional Victorian values
of self-control and self-denial for a new agenda of finding happi-
ness by fulfilling, not suppressing, appetites. Hefners version of
self-fulfillment, as Ehrenreich has described, focused not only on
“the Playmates in the centerfold . . . but a wealth of other consumer
items . . . imported liquor, stereo sets, mens colognes, luxury cars, and
fine clothes.” Yet her indictment overlooks feminisms own agenda
of self-gratification. Feminists did not focus explicitly on consumer
prosperity because they assumed it. As Friedan observed, much of
womens postwar conundrum stemmed from “our abundant society”
where middle-class people had unprecedented leisure time. The
Feminine Mystique instructed that feminism should focus on helping

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

247

women to find “‘self-realization’ or ‘self-fulfillment’ or ‘identity’ . . .
break out of the housewife trap and . . . [start] fulfilling their own
unique possibilities as separate human beings.” In terms of this broad
historical development, Hefner and women’s liberationists again
shared more than they ever recognized. 41

In addition, both Playboy and its feminist critics overemphasized
the power of sexual imagery. For Hefner, erotic representations
of the female body pointed the way to human freedom and happi-
ness, while for feminists they inscribed a kind of slavery for women.
Both sides exaggerated. While sex is a vital part of human life, it is
far from being the most important. In trying to make it so, along
with the visual images that arouse it, both disputants distorted real
life. Their extreme positions — Hefner defining unfettered sex as the
road to nirvana with Playboy photos as signposts; many early femi-
nists denouncing the sex act as inherently exploitive and female nudes
as posters of oppression — granted undue power to a single aspect of
human endeavor. Both overlook the likelihood that erotic imagery,
whether evocative or scandalous, pleasurable or annoying, is often
relatively inconsequential.

Finally, both Hefner and his feminist critics evolved on the issue
of the struggle for women’s rights. The publisher changed from a
romantic paternalist and denouncer of “womanization” in the 1950s
to an equal-rights liberal by the 1970s. He came to endorse a main-
stream agenda similar to that of Betty Friedan and the National
Organization for Women (NOW): integration of women into the pub-
lic sphere, equal pay for equal work, and abortion rights. Feminism
also evolved as it began splintering into contending factions by the
early 1970s. “Equity feminism,” or the movement for legal and social
equality of women eventually endorsed by Hefner, made steady gains
in the culture and legal system. “Gender feminism,” a newer, more
revolutionary movement inspired by books such as Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics (1970), contended that women were prisoners of
a patriarchal system and engaged in a gender war with their male
oppressors. This smaller, more radical movement mainly influenced
academe and the intelligentsia. By the mid-1970s, Hefner and
many equity feminists stood together, albeit uneasily, in the liberal
mainstream, and in later years feminists such as Christina Hoff
Sommers, Camille Paglia, and even Friedan herself would come to
the publisher’s defense. 42

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MR. PLAYBOY

Ultimately, the flashpoint issue of sexual objectification revealed
the shortcomings of both Hefner and early womens liberation-
ists. The problem was not so much portraying women as sexual
objects. In one sense, women are sexual objects for men, in the same
way that men, perhaps to a lesser extent, are for women. The prob-
lem comes in portraying them only in this light. Early feminists pin-
pointed Playboy’s penchant for superficial sexuality, but exaggerated
both the intent and the impact. At the same time, Hefner reasonably
defended his magazine s erotic portrayal of women as a legitimate
aspect of the sexual revolution, but refused to recognize that Playboy
often underplayed other aspects of female humanity. This tendency
appeared on the March 1972 cover, which depicted a woman in the
shape of a liquor bottle with a Playboy corkscrew lying alongside.

Perhaps the most reasonable conclusion came from the writer
Joyce Carol Oates, who reported that she had received an appeal
from NOW asking her to boycott Playboy as a future publication
venue. Hefners magazine, it said, mocked “the central message of
the womens movement, that women are and should be treated as
human beings.” While admitting some sympathy with the entreaty,
this distinguished writer ultimately rejected it in an eloquent reply:

I cannot claim to have much interest in the pictorial aspect
of playboy, but I see no reason to focus upon certain pages
and deliberately to neglect the very real presence of others.
playboy has published exceptionally fine interviews in recent
years (one of them with Germaine Greer, who was allowed
to be as frank and insulting and critical of playboy as she
pleased), some important articles, and . . . some very inter-
esting fiction. The stories of mine that appeared in playboy
dealt with male/female conflicts — and in nearly every case,

I dramatized the continuing cruelty of the myth of male supe-
riority in such a way that any reader, male or whatever, should
have felt some sympathy and understanding for women. . . .

I have never published anything in any magazine on the
basis of my agreeing, entirely, with every page of that maga-
zine. In a democratic society, there must be avenues of com-
munication in publications that appeal to a wide variety of
people, otherwise writers with certain beliefs will be read
only by people with those same beliefs, and change or growth

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

249

would come to an end. playboy is astonishingly liberal, and
even revolutionary in certain respects. . . .

My personal belief is that worship of youth, flesh, and
beauty of a limited nature is typically American and is fairly
innocuous. . . . [Y]our anger over PLAYBOY and its hedonistic
philosophy is possibly misdirected. 43

Indeed, the protests against Playboy gradually died down. But
animosity among womens liberationists remained strong, resurfacing
a decade later in a strange alliance with social conservatives in the
Reagan administration. But as the 1970s unfolded, Playboy’s guerrilla
war with feminism moved off center stage as more pressing issues
arose to demand Hefners attention. They would challenge both his
personal well-being and his professional survival.

Down the Rabbit Hole

A s the 1970s began, Hugh Hefner, in his own words, “had the
world on a string.” The Chicago publisher spread the gospel of
personal freedom and material abundance to countless converts
as much of his Aquarian Age dream actually seemed to materialize.
In 1972, Playboy reached a zenith of popularity with sales of seven
million magazines while Playboy Enterprises, Inc., expanded not
only into Playboy Clubs but hotels, resorts, filmmaking, books, and
records. Hefner personified the lifestyle he promoted. Surrounded
by beautiful women and celebrities in the Chicago mansion, he now
commuted regularly to Los Angeles and soon would purchase a sec-
ond estate in the Beverly Hills area. Moreover, he had fallen in love
with a beautiful young woman. Personally happy and professionally
triumphant beyond his wildest dreams, Hefner stood poised in the
early 1970s for coronation as the monarch of a Disney-style leisure
empire. He celebrated with his own version of the Roaring Twenties,
an exuberant era he always resented having missed. 1

Before long, however, Hefner and Playboy became caught up in
the complex cultural and political dynamic of the decade. Flowing
between the revolutionary 1960s and the conservative era inaugurated

250

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251

by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the 1970s were marked by a gradual but
inexorable process of polarization. On the one hand, this period saw
the fulfillment of 1960s liberation as many disciples of the sexual and
cultural revolution carried their crusade to full maturation. On the other
hand, a growing backlash gathered momentum as much of Middle
America increasingly drew back from radical excesses to embrace tra-
ditional social and political values.

To complicate matters further, ordinary citizens beset by political
exhaustion from Watergate, “Rust Relt” deindustrialization, inter-
national weakness in the wake of the Vietnam debacle, and social
dislocation from a powerful shift from the urban Northeast to the
“Sun Relt” of the South and West, fled the public realm. With a new
sense of limits and loss of optimism, many people — from evangelical
Christians to therapeutic liberals to New Age reformers — began turn-
ing inward to personal experiences and self-exploration. Increasingly
skeptical of remaking the world, Americans, in the words of one his-
torian, “chased new pasts, new futures, new Gods — and they chased
them by and for themselves.” 2

Hefner and his magazine stood at the convergence of these trends.
Symbolizing liberation, fueling reaction, and promoting a preoccu-
pation with self, they reflected the powerful countercurrents of the
age. Even as the publisher reveled in the liberationist excesses of
the Swinging Seventies, he was forced to confront its positive and
negative consequences. New challenges appeared in his struggles with
an upstart magazine competitor, a volatile business atmosphere, and a
drug scandal that placed him and his enterprise in mortal danger. Rut
perhaps the first sign of commingled possibilities and problems came
with romantic turmoil in his private life.

Since mid-1968, when Rarbi Renton had captured his heart, Hugh
Hefner had never been happier. To be near the young UCLA coed,
he gradually abandoned Chicago to spend increasing amounts of time
in Southern California. He overcame his dislike of traveling to spend
several weeks in 1969 and 1970 escorting her and a group of friends on
tours of Europe and Africa. Ry the following year, he was residing nearly
half the time in a second home in an exclusive area of Los Angeles.

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MR. PLAYBOY

But in the spring of 1971 Hefner put every t hing at risk. He met
a voluptuous young blonde in Chicago who attracted his romantic
attentions, and within a few months he found himself involved in a
love triangle that stretched across half the country and demanded
a precarious balancing act of emotions and energy. Always the film
fan, Hefner compared his situation to The Captains Paradise, the
1953 comedy where Alec Guinness portrayed a ship captain sailing
between Gibraltar and Tangier with a lover in each port. “In the
movie, the arrangement ended in disaster with both loves leaving
him. Could I hope for any better conclusion?” Hefner asked rhetori-
cally. The answer, of course, was no. The situation unraveled, but not
before a series of events, exhilarating and stressful alike, threw his
personal life into tumult for several years. 3

Barbi Benton, in many ways, was Hefners dream girl. Cute,
energetic, and charming, this former cheerleader and Miss Teenage
America contestant embodied his vivid adolescent fantasies of femi-
ninity. The allure was irresistible. “Barbi was the sort of girl you had
a crush on in high school or college who was invariably pinned to the
captain of the football team or some other BMOC,” the publisher
observed. 4

More subtly, another aspect of Benton s personality came to fas-
cinate Hefner. The perky brunette proved to have ambitions that
almost equaled his. Savoring the limelight, she loved her new high-
profile status and used it as a springboard to launch a brief film and
television career and, more successfully, a singing career. “She wanted
to model, be in the movies, become a celebrity, become a somebody,”
Hefner observed. “I saw this yearning in Barbi and encouraged it.”
Within a few years, after several singing tours and several recurring
television roles, she was delighted when a group of fans approached
the couple at a public event and “more wanted her autograph than
mine,” Hefner reported. She also enjoyed the opulence of the Playboy
lifestyle. Once, when giving a tour of Hefners home, a visitor asked
about the material in a large chandelier. She replied (Hefner took to
calling these “Barbieisms”), “Bronze or brass, whichever s better.” 5

But the relationship began to exhibit strain as Benton increasingly
sought to escape Hefners shadow and establish her own public iden-
tity. They disagreed over her attempt to start a musical career. He
made her cry after hearing a practice session and commenting that
she would never become a singer. “He said, Tm not telling you this,

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253

darling, because I want to hurt you. It’s because I don’t want to hurt
you,’” Benton related. “I took it as a challenge.” And indeed, despite
her thin voice, Benton became a fairly popular country singer within a
few years, and Hefner became supportive. She also made strides as
a comedic actress on television, joining the cast of the popular comedic
revue Hee Haw , and securing a recurring role on The Love Boat. 6

Hefners dalliances with other women also created tensions. While
Benton was his special girl, the publisher was far from monogamous.
In the early 1970s he had flings with many Playmates, including
Marilyn Cole, Janice Pennington, Sharon Johansen, Lillian Mueller,
and Hope Olson. He also enjoyed countless casual sexual encounters.
On a trip to St. Tropez in August 1971, for example, he spent several
days on a rented yacht and concluded his stay, in his own words, “by
bedding two British Bunnies in a menage a trois.” Two years later,
during one of Benton’s absences, a friend “brought over three cute
chicks on Saturday night to cheer me up and we had a little scene in
the grotto and the bedroom.” Benton tried to be stoical about the
situation. “I object to it, but I don’t hassle him; a girl just has to accept
it — guys fool around,” she told a Cosmopolitan reporter. “It doesn’t
mean he loves the other girls.” 7

But Benton remained ignorant of the fact that Hefner had become
deeply involved with another woman. He met Karen Christy when she
arrived at the Chicago mansion in May 1971. A twenty-year-old Texan
from Abilene, she had attended North Texas State University as an
art student, worked as a model and corporate secretary in Dallas, and
won a local Playboy Bunny Hunt in Dallas. She agreed to move north
and work in the Chicago Playboy Club because it would get her closer
to her dream — attending the Chicago Art Institute. As she settled
into the mansion dormitory, the other girls “thought I was a hick from
the sticks. And I was.” She met Hefner at a party and was struck by
his casual, friendly manner and wonderful sense of humor. 8

Hefner was smitten by this blonde bombshell. Christy had a baby
face with large eyes, upturned nose, full lips, and a stunning figure.
Partial to flashy, revealing clothes, she was wearing a pink, one-piece
hot-pants outfit that highlighted her voluptuous physique. They
spent the rest of the evening together, joking and flirting, playing
pool and pinball, munching on a midnight supper, then descending
to the mansion’s underwater bar for drinks and a long, quiet conversa-
tion. Their evening culminated with a movie in his bedroom and an

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MR. PLAYBOY

embrace on his round bed. “I can still remember the magic moment
when I started to slowly unzip the front of her outfit and she didn’t
stop me,” Hefner recalled later. 9

Hefner found the young Texas beauty enormously seductive.
“I don’t think I was ever more physically attracted to anyone than
Karen Christy,” he said later. “She was sweet, soft, and sensual, all at
the same time” and displayed an “erotic playfulness” that triggered his
sexual ardor. If Barbi Benton embodied Hefner’s high school cheer-
leader fantasies, Christy represented another, cinematic set of images
from his youth. In his words, “she looked like she’d stepped out of
one of those Busby Berkeley musicals from the early Thirties.” Their
sex life became, even by his standards, particularly passionate. 10

This shy southern girl appealed to Hefner with her sweet drawl,
down-home charm, and a self-deprecating sense of humor. She
shared his enthusiasm for movies and games and they spent hours
watching films in the mansion ballroom and playing backgammon,
Monopoly, Risk, and pinball with a small group of mansion regu-
lars: Shel Silverstein, Bobbie Arnstein, Gene Siskel, and John Dante.
She proved ingenious at giving him unique gifts. For their marathon
Monopoly games, she commissioned small board figurines of him
and her — he was depicted in a bathrobe smoking a pipe, she in a
hot-pants outfit — as well as the other four regular players. Another
time she presented him with a lifelike portrait of herself as a reclining
nude painted in the Vargas style with a special hinge in the frame that
exposed her pubic area. 11

At Hefner’s request, Christy soon moved into a first-floor apartment
at the mansion. As their relationship deepened, the publisher show-
ered the Texas beauty with outlandish gifts: a full-length white mink
coat, a white Mark IV Lincoln automobile, a five-carat diamond cock-
tail ring from Tiffany’s. He also chose her as Playboy’s Miss December
1971. Christy returned this affection, becoming his steady companion
in Chicago and accompanying him on jaunts to Walt Disney World,
the Caribbean, and a backgammon tournament in New York City. She
patiently awaited his return from trips to Los Angeles, once decorating
the Chicago mansion trees with yellow ribbons in a reference to the hit
song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” which celebrated a lover’s homecoming
in such a fashion. Hefner delighted in these sentimental gestures. By
the end of 1972, he confessed, “my love for her had become every
bit the equal of what I felt for Barbi.” 12

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255

Thus throughout 1972 and the first half of 1973, Hefner found
himself in a full-fledged love triangle with two beautiful young
women. Trying to balance them, he flitted from the Midwest to the
West Coast on an every-other-week schedule, alternately spend-
ing time with either Benton or Christy while making long-distance
calls to the other. The stress of the situation occasionally turned to
comedy. He wrote a memo instructing that Christy’s pinball scores
be erased from the tote board in the game room when Benton was
on the premises, and then put back when she left. Another time, when
Hefner had Christy over at his Los Angeles mansion while Benton
was gone, he instructed his security people to detain the mistress
of the manor at the gate should she return and signal him by cut-
ting off the piped-in music. As the publisher and his blonde girl-
friend were consorting in the grotto, the music suddenly stopped
and Christy, wrapped in a towel, dashed to a waiting limo to be
whisked out the back gate. A few minutes later, Hefner realized that it
had been a false alarm from a simple gap in the tape. Sitting alone,
he heard the music resume. 13

Each point on the love triangle offered a different perspective.
Benton realized that her famous boyfriend saw other women but
remained in the dark about her new rival. Christy, who knew
about Benton, of course, faced things realistically. She accepted
Hefners reassurances that the Benton relationship was nearing an
end, noting “you’d have to be a real idiot to believe something a
man says to you about another girl. I mean, I was naive but I wasn’t
stupid.” Hefner rationalized what he was doing as a variation on the
old wife-mistress fantasy of sustaining a comfortable, harmonious
relationship in public and an exciting, illicit relationship in private.
As for his efforts to hold it all together, he used the old vaudeville
quip about using every available minute in a show: “I’m dancing as
fast as I can.” 14

In the summer of 1973, the situation finally exploded. Earlier,
Benton had grown suspicious of Hefner when she found white bobby
pins in his bathrobe and saw one of his assistants walk by with a
notepad upon which was a scribble about “a mink coat for Karen
Christy.” When Benton inquired, Hefner reassured her it was noth-
ing and that “you’re the girl I love.” But then came an unmistakable,
public sign of betrayal. An article in Time on men’s magazines blew
his cover with this description: “Long a two-of-eveiything consumer,

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MR. PLAYBOY

Hefner has lately extended the principle to his romantic life. Former
Playmate Barbi Benton, his longtime escort, lives in the California
mansion; blonde Karen Christy, an ex-Bunny in the Chicago Playboy
Club, is ensconced in his Chicago quarters. Somehow the arrange-
ment continues to work.” It also featured an incriminating photo-
graph of Hefner with his arm around Christy watching a movie at the
Chicago mansion. A furious Benton confronted Hefner and moved
out of the Playboy Mansion West in a huff and got her own apart-
ment. In Benton’s words, “I didn’t want to have anything to do with
him. I just thought he was a cheat and a liar.” After several weeks, she
surrendered to his entreaties and moved back in the mansion, but
she kept the apartment for insurance. 15

The situation grew increasingly stressful as Benton and Christy
sniped at one another, and at Hefner, in the press. In People mag-
azine, Benton described Christy as “just another girl who lives in
one of the bunny dorms” and added, “I thought it was a bit tacky of
[Hefner] to allow a photographer to shoot a picture of him with his
arm around another girl when I have been living with him as his wife
for five years.” Christy dismissed Benton. ‘Why should I be jealous?
She used to live in the Mansion. Now she doesn’t,” she told a reporter.
At Thanksgiving 1973 tensions escalated when Benton and Christy
both sought to spend the holiday with the publisher. Benton began
to see other men, having an affair with a fellow cast member on Hee
Haw and sleeping with an old boyfriend on a ski trip. 16

Then t hings began to crumble with Christy. She confessed to an
affair with Val Lownes, Victor Lowness son, when she was lonely dur-
ing Hefner’s many absences. They reconciled, but things were never
the same. The couple began to quarrel, and Christy became increas-
ingly spunky in asserting herself. She began to demand parity in the
relationship, and he responded angrily. “[He would] stomp his feet and
beat his pipe on the table and turn purple in the face,” she described.
“I just thought he was spoiled, he’s always had everything he wants for
so many years, that he really doesn’t remember what it’s like to have
to compromise.” But Christy stood her ground and Bobbie Arnstein,
Hefner’s executive secretaiy, said, “She didn’t think anybody could talk
back to him . . . the way I did and get away with it.” 17

The young Texan, for all of the blonde-bimbo stereotypes, was
no dummy. While deeply fond of her older lover and the mansion
lifestyle, she always saw the arrangement as temporary and grew

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257

weary of his domineering ways and escapades with other women.
“I loved Hef but he’s very manipulative ... I resented it,” she
explained. During one particularly bitter quarrel, Christy claimed
that she loved him more than he did her. When he replied that she
should love him more, she furiously exclaimed, “Why should I love
you more? Because you’re rich and famous? You’re always saying you
don’t want people to love you because you’re rich and famous and
that’s the only thing about you that makes you more loveable than
me.” She stalked out of the room and left the mansion. The distraught
publisher learned that she had gone to a girlfriend’s nearby place and,
even though it was after midnight, he went throughout the apartment
building ringing doorbells until he located her. Standing outside the
door, he pleaded with her to return, and appeared so contrite that
she finally agreed. 18

By early 1974, however, Christy concluded that her life with
Hefner had reached a dead end. She realized “he would do anything
in the world for you as long as it didn’t inconvenience him in any
way. In other words, what Hef needed came first to Hef, and what you
needed came second.” In March she finally left for good. In order to
escape the bodyguards who accompanied her in public, she went to a
favorite dress shop, slipped out through the rear service entrance, and
took a cab to a girlfriend’s, who had “borrowed” her white Lincoln the
day before. Christy drove to Texas, and while Hefner called several
times to convince her to come back, she refused. Over the next few
years they would have several brief rendezvous, but the relationship
was over. 19

Benton and Hefner patched things up and stayed together a few
more years, but their romance slowly withered. Not only did her
career keep her away for great stretches of time, but the issue of
marriage and children drove a wedge between them. While Benton
wanted to get married and have children, Hefner balked. They dis-
cussed the topic many times but disagreed on what was said — Benton
claimed that Hefner proposed to her, while he adamantly denied
doing so. The relationship finally collapsed in 1976 when she accused
him of having an affair with one of her close friends. Bemused, he
demanded who had told her, and when Benton named the informant,
he said, “Oh, she did, huh? Well, I had an affair with her, too.” That was
the last straw for Benton, and she moved out for good. But she never got
over Hefner completely. Years later she still reminisced fondly about

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MR. PLAYBOY

their years together: “Wherever I go or whoever I end up with, that’s
a torch I’ll always carry. Hef was the love of my life.” 20

The complications of Hefner’s romantic life in the early 1970s
proved to be portentous. At the veiy time he was struggling to maintain
simultaneous relationships with two girlfriends, a much more serious
situation arose. A drug scandal erupted in the heart of his world,
the Chicago mansion, as agents of the federal government began to
circle. Accusation, arrest, suicide, and banner headlines followed and
threatened to destroy the fantasy life that he had created.

On December 9, 1974, the front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune
blared, “Federal Drug Probers Zeroing in on Hefner.” The exclusive
story informed readers that the publisher had become “a prime target
of a federal narcotics investigation” and was suspected of harboring
illicit drug activity at his mansions and ordering a cover-up when
drug agents closed in. According to one source, “he’s in a helluva
lot of trouble. There is no doubt about it.” The next day, a Chicago
Sun-Times headline fed the uproar by claiming “Hollywood Figures
Tied to Playboy Drug Probe,” especially a prominent movie actor
who allegedly had transported illegal drugs to Hefner’s Los Angeles
mansion. 21

While shocking to the public, these stories did not surprise those
close to the situation. For the last two years, in fact, federal drug
agents had been stalking Hefner. It had begun in September 1972
when the federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) contacted Bobbie
Arnstein, Hefner’s executive assistant at the Chicago mansion and one
of his closest friends. Agents accused her of participating in a drug-
carrying venture on a trip to Miami with her boyfriend, Ron Scharf,
about a year earlier. Over the next two months, they interrogated her
three more times. In December, DEA agents arrested Scharf and two
other men and indicted them on charges of transporting cocaine to
Chicago. Meanwhile, they continued to grill Arnstein, accusing her of
conspiring in a drug-running operation, goading her to testify against
Scharf, and, most importantly, pressuring her to finger the ultimate
recipient of the illegal drugs. From the beginning, they made it clear
that they were after bigger game — namely, her boss — and dangled

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the prospect of immunity in return for her cooperation. Protesting
Hefners utter innocence, she steadfastly refused. 22

Over the next fifteen months, government lawyers — they included
James Thompson, the U.S. attorney, and Douglas P. Roller, attorney
for the Justice Departments special strike force — built their case.
Finally, on March 21, 1974, DEA agents arrested Arnstein on the
sidewalk as she exited the Playboy Mansion on charges of conspiracy
to distribute and sell cocaine. As newspaper photographers snapped
pictures, officers handcuffed her and looked through her purse,
where a vial of cocaine was discovered. As they took her away, she
quipped, with a burst of black humor for which she was known, “But
I haven’t had lunch.” The ordeal that began, however, would be any-
thing but funny. 23

After being released on bond, Arnstein suffered mounting
government pressure to implicate Hefner. This investigation, while
aimed at the Playboy publisher, in a larger sense represented a
counterattack against 1960s rebellion. Never popular with local
Chicago authorities, who were offended by his social and cultural
values, Hefner had made Richard Nixons infamous “enemies list”
as a representative of 1960s liberal degeneracy. Antidrug zealots in
the government, representing a conservative backlash from Middle
America, viewed him as an outlandish symbol of that decades dis-
senting lifestyle. Given the sex-and-drugs values of many counter-
cultural figures, and the increasing popularity of cocaine among the
beautiful people in entertainment circles, it was not surprising that
the Playboy Mansion came under suspicion. When a young woman
close to Hefner surfaced in a drug sting, representatives of the Silent
Majority saw their chance to bring him low. 24

But one problem sullied this scenario: Hefner, despite the pros-
ecutors’ suspicions, was no drug-culture enthusiast. For many years,
of course, he had habitually used amphetamines because they kept
him awake for marathon work sessions. By the late 1960s, he also
occasionally smoked marijuana, primarily for its salutary effect on
lovemaking. But he notoriously avoided harder drugs of all kinds. As
Hefner explained later, “Everyone close to me knew that I was more
conservative in my attitude about drugs than most of my friends.
I had never used cocaine ... I had never seen anyone use cocaine
precisely because my friends knew my attitude, my prejudice against
hard drugs.” 25

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MR. PLAYBOY

Nonetheless, the DEA and federal prosecutors were convinced
that Hefner presided over a cocaine emporium at the Playboy
Mansion. And the fact that some of his friends were indulging in
the stylish new drug made him vulnerable. Arnstein was caught up
in this larger struggle. The authorities relentlessly pressured her to
provide evidence of a drug pipeline to her boss. Knowing of Hefner s
innocence, and racked with guilt over the torrent of trouble she had
brought down on him, she adamantly resisted but suffered severe
emotional convulsions. A couple of weeks after her arrest, she took
an overdose of sleeping pills but friends rushed her to the hospital in
time to save her life. This proved to be a temporary respite. The drug
scandal exposed a mental fragility that sent her into an inexorable
spiral of decline. 26

Arnstein s troubled personality had deep roots in an unpleasant
childhood. She had been born in 1940, along with her twin brother
Eddie, into a comfortable Chicago family, but when she was ten
her father died suddenly and the family was forced to move in with
relatives. Although a bright student with a keen sense of humor,
Bobbie did not take school seriously and became a rebellious, street-
wise teenager with bleached blond hair who loved television and
movies, drank a bit, and dated unpopular boys whom she found
interesting. 27

Once out of high school, Arnstein held a series of low-paying jobs
before becoming a receptionist at Playboy in 1960. She took to her
new environment and by 1962 had risen through the ranks to become
Hefner s executive secretary. Arnstein grew close to her boss and they
became lovers for a short time before settling into a deep friendship.
She also became close friends with Cynthia Maddox, with the two
women sharing an apartment for several months. 28

Then disaster struck. Bobbie had fallen in love with Tom Lownes,
Victor Lowness younger brother, a Harvard-educated journalist with
literary talent and a warm personality who had joined Playboy as
an editor after working for the Miami Herald and Show Business
Illustrated. After dating for several months, they discussed marriage
and in the summer of 1963 drove to Florida in Lowness Volkswagen
to visit his mother. In southern Indiana, Arnstein took the wheel for
a stretch, but at some point she lost control of the car and skidded off
the road. While she was thrown from the vehicle in the wreck and
suffered lacerations and a broken arm, Lownes was killed. Consumed

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261

by guilt, Amstein never drove again and told anyone who would listen
that she had killed Lownes and wished she had died instead. When
she returned to the mansion for a long convalescence, friends wor-
ried about her state of mind and monitored her closely. She began
drinking too much and attempted suicide once, but slowly seemed
to regain her equilibrium. She eventually began dating again, but the
relationships always remained casual. 29

Arnstein found a creative outlet, however, as Hefners executive
assistant. She had moved into the mansion in 1961 and had assumed a host
of duties. She scheduled Hefners business meetings, communicated
his editorial decisions to Playboy executives, shopped for his clothes
and gifts, ran interference with his girlfriends, supervised garden-
ers and technicians and secretaries at the domicile, regulated the
guest list for movies and parties, handled his mail, and performed
countless sundry tasks. Loyally protecting her boss’s privacy, she told
callers, “I’m sorry, but Mr. Hefner does not receive telephone calls.
He speaks on the phone only when he specifically originates calls
himself.” She appeared often at his side, notepad in hand, ready to
handle any situation. “It was clear that she was his link to the world.
This was no ordinary secretarial relationship; she was more like an
ambassador,” an observer described. 30

Arnstein’s energetic, efficient presence matched the intense
demands of her job. Small of stature, with shoulder-length auburn
hair and a dazzling smile, she managed Hefner’s schedule with
a combination of intelligence, quick wit, and impatience with
pretense. Many friends considered her to be the funniest person
they had ever known, and her repartee became legendary. She
collected comedy albums and loved the dark, irreverent humor of
Lenny Bruce, and later, Richard Pryor. While suspicious of most
compliments, she glowed when a close friend, Shirley Hillman,
once remarked that she was as funny as Bruce. Amstein occasionally
would walk by Hillman and say with a laugh, “Tell me that Lenny
Bruce line again.” 31

Arnstein’s humor flashed out unpredictably. When a preoccupied
waiter at an Indian restaurant asked, “Can I get you something, sir?”
she immediately pulled up her sweater to expose her breasts and
said, “Do I look like a guy to you?” The startled waiter regained his
dignity and replied in his most proper manner, “No charge.” The
group broke into laughter, and they received no bill for the meal.

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MR. PLAYBOY

Another time she composed a “Memo to New Bunny Mothers” that
mercilessly mocked the rigid rules at the Playboy Clubs:

Bunny Mothers and General Managers should not social-
ize with Bunnies; Floor Managers and Bunnies should not
socialize with General Managers; Bunny Mothers and Boom
Directors can socialize with Floor Managers, but not with two
or more General Managers present; Cooks and Busboys can’t
socialize with anyone and neither can the hatcheck Bunny;
Flugh M. Flefner, when present or absent, can or cannot
socialize with anyone, depending on how he feels some of the
time; the rest of the time he can do whatever he likes. You will
come to love the freedom of your new job.

She delighted in skewering self-important Playboy executives. When
she saw one approaching, a favorite tactic had her engage Flefner in
conversation about his sexual adventures in previous days, which she
knew he liked to talk about. She would ask him question after ques-
tion, seeming to hang on every word as the executive waited, fuming,
in the next room. Then she would turn and make a face to a grinning
audience of secretaries who had witnessed the performance . 32

Amstein’s relationship with Flefner became the centerpiece of her
life. She always carried a bit of a torch and idolized her boss even as she
became aware of his faults. Close friends believed that Amstein’s pow-
erful emotional ties to Flefner stemmed from her father’s early death
and that she loved him, yearned for his approval, and resented his hold
over her all at the same time. “She worshipped Fief,” explained one of
these friends. “For the most part, he was daddy. Fie filled that place
up in her that she needed in order to feel like a whole person .” 33
Flumor and her skillful reading of his moods sustained their rela-
tionship. Amstein and Flefner both possessed a keen wit, and their
exchanges of quips and jibes became legendary around the mansion.
“I thought she could give and take with him better than anyone Fve
ever seen. And I think he enjoyed her company so much for that,”
noted Karen Christy. When Flefner showed up at her desk to exult
that he had finally convinced Barbi Benton to have sex with him,
for instance, Arnstein replied, “Well, Fief, why don’t you rent the
Goodyear Blimp and tell the world. I’m sure everyone will be just
as thrilled as I am.” A laughing Flefner responded, “But you can’t

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talk that way to a man worth a hundred million dollars!” She did an
uncanny imitation of an angry Hefner, and when the publisher was
chewing someone out she loved to stand behind him and mimic his
actions while the poor victim struggled not to laugh. At the same
time, Arnstein excelled at reading her boss’s state of mind, shrewdly
sensing when she should vanish, hang out with him, or maneuver
him into a bout of serious work as she took notes and efficiently dealt
with issues. Hefner deeply appreciated the talents of his right hand
woman, once describing her as “the brightest, wittiest, most insight-
ful, sensitive, insecure, caring, craziest, most contradictory female
I’ve ever known. ... I loved her.” 34

As all of Amstein’s friends came to realize, however, her bravado and
wit masked a deeply troubled soul. In fact, she may have suffered from a
manic-depressive disorder. In her teens, she had contemplated suicide
and as an adult often sank into deep, black emotional holes and talked
repeatedly about wanting to die. Friends observed her intense feel-
ings of inadequacy, heartwrenching descriptions of life as unbearably
painful, and witnessed expressions of self-hatred. They convinced her
to see a psychiatrist — predictably, she began to do hilarious riffs on
how worthless psychiatrists were — and worried when she began to rely
increasingly on speed and sleeping pills to regulate her highs and lows.
At least one suicide attempt in the late 1960s only exacerbated the
concern. She was “a tragedy waiting to happen,” said Michelle Urry, a
close friend. “She was so funny, and she could be so vulnerable. The
vulnerability was terrifying sometimes when you saw it.” 35

Arnstein’s emotional problems gradually became entangled with
Hefner, the central presence in her life. She constantly sought his
approval as a way to help bolster her identity and self-worth. Given
his narcissistic bent, Hefner was ill-suited to provide such psychologi-
cal reinforcement, but even if he had been it would have been insuf-
ficient. “Nobody could have filled her up,” observed Urry. “Bobbie
needed to do it for herself.” 36

For all of her hero worship of Hefner, Arnstein also felt harried,
frustrated, and occasionally unappreciated in her job. She complained
about its pressures and talked about resigning. In 1973, she com-
plained to Dick Rosenzweig about being underpaid and unacknowl-
edged. She observed that while she loved Hefner, her sensitivity to his
needs “is the very same thing that can cause such anxiety.” She com-
plained that he was incredibly demanding and took her for granted. 37

264

MR. PLAYBOY

By the early 1970s, Arnstein was acting more erratically. Mortified
by weight she had put on her slight frame over the past few years, she
checked into a facility in Texas for several weeks and dropped forty
pounds. Exhilarated by her success, she returned to Chicago with a
penchant for health food, gave up liquor and marijuana, and purchased
a flashy new wardrobe of platform shoes, tight jeans, feathers, scarves,
chains, and jewelry. She also began dating younger men on a regular
basis and experimented with lesbianism, having at least one affair with
a female coworker. At times she seemed on top of the world, ensconced
in Hefner s inner circle in Chicago and a regular at the marathon game-
playing sessions along with Shel Silverstein, Gene Siskel, John Dante,
and Karen Christy. Other times the depressive episodes would intrude
and she would return to her old reliance on drugs. 38

Then Arnstein met someone who would send her life onto a crash
course. Ronnie Scharf was a good-looking, charming young man
seven years her junior who was also a small-time drug dealer. As
her infatuation grew, so did her drug usage — cocaine, Quaaludes,
Placidils, and eventually heroin. She strained to keep Scharf s atten-
tion and he began spending many nights in her mansion quarters,
where they would get high in the early morning hours. In 1971 came
the fateful trip to Miami with her boyfriend and his roommate, Ira
Sapstein. While she lounged by the pool and soaked up the tropical
sunshine, Scharf and Sapstein purchased cocaine from a dealer and
transported the drug back to Chicago. 39

A subsequent chain of events sent her life spiraling downward —
the initial contact from DEA agents in the fall of 1972, Scharf s and
Sapsteins indictment at the end of the year, several months of inter-
rogation and pressure, and Arnsteins own indictment and arrest in
March 1974. As drug agents and prosecutors cajoled her to finger
Hefner, she began to crack under the pressure and attempted suicide.
She was despondent that she had drawn Hefner, the man she idol-
ized, into great danger when he was completely innocent. Relentless
prosecutors mocked her for “taking the fall” for her boss, denigrated
her as a whore, and threatened a long jail sentence if she didn’t hand
him over. U.S. Attorney James Thompson even called her into his
office to say that he had received word that a contract had been put
out on her life and that she should trust neither friend nor foe. The
clear, if ludicrous, implication was that Hefner might have her killed.
Arnstein s depression deepened and her drug use grew. 40

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265

Meanwhile, Hefner and Playboy were sucked deeper into the
maw of the drug investigation. The Chicago Strike Force circled
the publisher, looking for an opening. It sent girls to infiltrate the
Playboy Mansion and spy on Hefner and his guests, and secured
inside informants in Allan Crawford, the mansions security chief,
and William Noel, the publishers personal valet. The DEA dug into
Hefners procurement of Dexedrine, discovering an improper pro-
cess involving a local pharmacy where amphetamine prescriptions
were written for mansion employees and then delivered for the
publisher s use. But this was small stuff. Despite what Hefner termed
“the Inquisition,” the government uncovered no evidence connecting
him to the procurement, use, or sale of hard drugs. 41

On October 22, 1974, Bobbie Arnstein’s trial began. It was a
disaster. Over several days government prosecutors implicated
her in the Miami drug deal, with their star witness being George
Mathews, the convicted narcotics dealer in Miami who now claimed
that he had seen Arnstein put the cocaine in her purse to carry it to
Chicago when she, Scharf, and Sapstein departed. This represented
a change from his initial story, when he said that only Scharf and
Sapstein were involved, and Mathews admitted that prosecutors
had promised him a reduced jail term if he cooperated. Arnstein
vehemently denied his testimony, and indeed, Mathews appeared
to perjure himself in order to get his sentence reduced from fifteen
years to three months. But her lawyers refused to let her testify,
fearing that she would fall apart under cross-examination. They
also rightly perceived that Arnstein would alienate a working-class
Chicago jury with her wisecracking persona and expensive wardrobe
of knee-length boots, flashy vests, and wild-print skirts and blouses.
She acted self-destructively in the courtroom, passing notes and gig-
gling with Scharf. Once, her close friend and attorney, Keith Stroup,
became furious when he observed that one folded-up note actually
contained a small pinch of drugs. The jury found both Scharf and
Arnstein guilty of cocaine trafficking, and the judge sentenced the
former to a six-year prison term. Incredibly, he handed Arnstein
a provisional fifteen-year sentence that had a double purpose: it
allowed for several weeks of psychiatric evaluation to be followed
by a resentencing, and it gave prosecutors more time to pressure
her to say that she was supplying Hefner as a way to save herself
from the prison term she dreaded. 42

266

MR. PLAYBOY

In the wake of Arnstein’s conviction, a torrent of bad publicity
engulfed Playboy and its publisher. Front-page newspaper headlines
blared that a broadening federal investigation was closing in on Hefner
and had uncovered a drug link to a prominent Hollywood celebrity,
who later proved to be Peter Lawford. Accompanying stories noted
that Playboy employees had been subpoenaed to testify before a
Chicago grand jury, and that a former security chief at the mansion
claimed that marijuana and cocaine were regularly used at the Playboy
Mansion. Then a state’s attorney decided to reopen an investigation
into the death of former Bunny Adrienne Pollock, who had died in
1973 from an overdose of alcohol and Quaaludes. Even though she
had expired in her own apartment, a Cook County grand jury began
to look into a possible link to drug use in the Playboy empire. 43

Hefners troubles attracted national attention. The Los Angeles
Times detailed his emergence as a “Drug Probe Target” while
Newsweek probed “The Playboy Connection.” In the Village Voice ,
Alexander Cockburn asked, “Who’s After Hef ?” and noted that the
Chicago Strike Force and the DEA seemed out to get Hefner, warn-
ing that he would discover that “after all those years of parties and hos-
pitality and of famous names in the guestbook, how few true friends
he has.” Friendly observers in Chicago were reduced to grim jokes.
“Anyone who wrote the 25-part, 200,000 word ‘Playboy Philosophy’
doesn’t need any drugs, he’s a one-man Nembutal factory,” quipped
the columnist Bob Greene. “Reliable sources confirm that a platoon
of Playboy’s top photo retouching artists have been on overtime, with
orders to airbrush Hefner’s pipe out of all existing photographs.” 44

A string of publicity blunders by Hefner and Playboy personnel
exacerbated the situation. A few weeks before Arnstein’s trial, the pub-
lisher hosted a fund-raiser for NORML (the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) while the police stopped the
manager of the Playboy Club in Los Angeles for suspected drunk
driving and found cocaine in his car. Then the executive secretary of
the Playboy Foundation was arrested in Chicago for possession of a
quarter pound of marijuana in her automobile trunk. Then, incred-
ibly, the January 1975 issue of Playboy carried an article promising
“The Truth About Cocaine.” It noted that “a blizzard of cocaine is
blowing over us” as it “has spilled from the ghetto and the mansion
to become the illegal drug of choice, second only to marijuana, of
many prosperous middle-class Americans.” While the piece offered

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a dispassionate depiction of the attractions and dangers of cocaine, it
seemed to spotlight Playboy as a symbol of the drug culture. 45

Meanwhile, Arnstein, terrified by the prospect of a jail sentence
and horrified at having dragged her beloved boss into a widening
scandal, fell apart. Huddled in the Chicago mansion, she alternated
between panic and depression. For his part, Hefner was caught in
a bind. He had paid all her legal bills, refused to blame her, and
offered personal encouragement whenever the opportunity arose.
But with Playboy lawyers insisting that he keep a distance to protect
himself, he offered no public statement on her behalf. Having moved
to California, he encouraged her to come west and continue her regu-
lar job but refused to let her live in the Playboy Mansion West. A pro-
foundly depressed Arnstein plummeted emotionally. Friends worried
that she was in “very, very bad shape” as she cried, talked of suicide,
and repeated that she did not want to be an imposition on Hefner and
the Playboy organization. 46

Finally, Arnstein cracked. On the evening of January 11, 1975,
she had dinner with Shirley and Richard Hillman at their apartment
and seemed in reasonably calm spirits. She left their place late in the
evening, took in a movie with a boyfriend, and then returned to
the mansion. Gathering a few personal items, she then left in the early
morning hours of January 12 and walked a few blocks to the Hotel
Maryland on Rush Street, where she procured a room on the top
floor, hung out a “Do Not Disturb” sign, and locked the door. The
next afternoon, when the maid could not get in to clean the room,
hotel managers broke the lock and entered to find Arnstein sprawled
on the bed, dead. She had ingested a massive quantity of barbiturates.
Authorities discovered an envelope propped up with one last wise-
crack scrawled on the envelope: “Boring note of explanation within.”
The long, rambling suicide note said, in part:

It was I alone who acted and conceived of this act. ... I am
innocent of the charges. Despite the perjured testimony of the
government s “star” witness, I was never part of any conspiracy
to transport or distribute the alleged drugs. ... I don’t sup-
pose it matters that I say it, but Hugh M. Hefner is — though
few will ever realize it — a staunchly upright, rigorously moral
man — I know him well and he has never been involved in any
criminal activity which is being attributed to him now. 47

268

MR. PLAYBOY

When Hefner took a telephone call in Los Angeles and heard of
Amstein’s suicide, he was stunned. But as the shock wore off, anger
took its place and he dismissed advice from his attorneys that he sit
tight and withhold comment. Instead, he instructed aides to schedule
a news conference at the Chicago mansion for the following after-
noon and to prepare the Big Bunny for a quick flight. He immediately
began preparing a statement, writing in longhand on a yellow legal
pad, and continued working through the night on the long flight to
Chicago. A limousine took Hefner and his party directly to the man-
sion, and after a quick bite of breakfast and more revision, he faced
over one hundred reporters and a battery of microphones, television
cameras, and flash bulbs at 1 p.m. on January 14. Disheveled and deeply
distressed, struggling to contain his emotions as tears threatened to
roll down his haggard face, Hefner struck back at a government he
believed had crossed the line of legality and decency — a government
so determined to get him that it had hounded a close friend into kill-
ing herself. 48

“Youll excuse me if I look a little harried,” he began hesitantly.
“I’m quite upset.” But he gathered himself and launched an attack
on what he described as “not a legitimate narcotics investigation
at all but a politically motivated, anti-Playboy witch hunt.” He pas-
sionately asserted his own innocence of any connection with hard
drugs and condemned the governments relentless pressure on
Bobbie Arnstein. He accused drug agents and the court of using
an extremely harsh jail sentence “in an attempt to force Bobbie
Arnstein to falsely incriminate me.” Asserting that “the enemies’
list mentality of Watergate” was alive and well in the government,
he argued that the forces of “authoritarian repression” continued
to threaten a free society. Arnstein was “one of the best, brightest,
most worthwhile women I have ever known,” the publisher said,
his voice breaking. “She will be missed by me and a great many
others as well.” 49

Hefner drew blood. In subsequent days, James Thompson tried
to brush off his accusations, describing the publisher as “off the wall”
and declaring, “I’m not sure that what Hefner stands for these days is
all that relevant, or that any prosecution of him would mean much.”
But a wave of sympathy slowly built for the Playboy publisher as a
subject of government persecution. Supportive articles appeared in
the Chicago Sun-Times and Washington Post , while both Newsweek

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269

and Time gave full vent to Hefners accusations. Most notably, the
conservative columnist William S afire, writing in the New York Times,
questioned the tactics of prosecutors in going after celebrities such as
Hefner. Regarding Arnsteins fifteen-year jail term, he wrote, “What
clearer invitation to perjury can there be than such a ‘provisional sen-
tence’? It is one thing to give a cooperative witness a break, entirely
another to threaten to let a defendant rot in the slammer until he or
she tells the story the prosecution wants.” 50

Over the next several months the drug case against Hefner col-
lapsed completely. When the Chicago Strike Force sent its final
report to Washington, it was obvious they had no real evidence
against the Playboy publisher and the Justice Department did
not move to prosecute. Meanwhile, the DEA came under attack
for unethical, even illegal tactics and the attorney general in the
new administration of President Gerald Ford launched an internal
investigation of “possible mismanagement or corruption.” In May
1975 the head of the DEA was asked to resign. Later in the summer
James Thompson resigned as U.S. attorney to run for the governor-
ship of Illinois, and his successor, Samuel K. Skinner, decided to
drop the case. “No evidence of unlawful acquisition or distribution
of cocaine or other hard drugs by Mr. Hefner, the corporation, or its
employees has been adduced,” he said in a public statement accom-
panying the conclusion of the inquiry. In a personal letter to Hefner,
Skinner came close to an apology. “I am aware that the last year was
not an easy one for you or your associates, and I truly wish it could
have been avoided,” he wrote. “I have always felt that any investiga-
tion should be conducted without any publicity whatsoever in order
to protect the individuals involved.” 51

So Hefner finally was vindicated in a drug case that seemed to
have been driven mainly by an anti -Playboy political agenda. But
much damage had been done. Most disturbingly, a young woman lay
dead. The Playboy image also had been sullied as, in a sense, Hefner
won a Pyrrhic victory. While he was exonerated from any personal
involvement in drug trafficking, his name had been blackened for
the better part of two years by media stories depicting his lifestyle
as a hotbed of drug use and depravity. Such images created serious,
lasting damage. They fed a growing concern in Middle America that
a climate of permissiveness had created moral dry rot in the structure
of American values. The Illinois electorate, significantly, chose Jim

270

MR. PLAYBOY

Thompson as governor in 1976 with 65 percent of the vote and then
reelected him for three additional terms.

Hefners ordeal in the drug scandal was accompanied by mount-
ing financial problems in his company by the mid-1970s. Early in the
decade, Playboy Enterprises Inc.’s profit potential seemed almost lim-
itless. In 1972, a long, glowing piece in the New York Times described
it as a “manifold leisure time’ industry which sprawls voluptuously
across the game board of American life.” It compared Hefner’s opera-
tion to the Disney entertainment empire and pointed to several new
foreign-language editions of Playboy, a new magazine titled Oui,
seventeen Playboy Clubs, three gambling casinos, four large resort
hotels, two movie theaters, a book division, a film division, a record
company, modeling and limousine agencies, and dozens of merchan-
dise items emblazoned with the bunny logo. Forbes magazine agreed,
noting that Hefner had gone “far beyond selling entertaining fanta-
sies as an escape from life’s cares; now Playboy wants to sell its fantasy
as a way of life.” 52

At the same time, financial trouble loomed on the horizon. Caught
up in the company’s growth and eager to create a multifaceted enter-
tainment empire, Hefner and his lieutenants had indulged in over-
expansion. They failed to create a suitable management structure for
their far-flung endeavors and by the mid-1970s stresses and strains
were becoming evident. The magazine continued to turn a profit,
but many Playboy Clubs had begun losing money — the British clubs,
because of gambling revenue, were an exception — while hotel and
resort ventures were floundering. The Great Gorge resort in New
Jersey, for instance, which opened in 1972, was a disaster from the
beginning. This giant luxury hotel of over six hundred rooms cost PEI
over $30 million to build, and it never came close to the 60 percent
occupancy it required to break even. Playboy’s movie projects also
fizzled. Roman Polanski’s 1971 Macbeth enjoyed critical success but
generated little box-office appeal, while the company’s follow-up, The
Naked Ape, flopped both artistically and financially. 53

PEI’s problems could be seen in its volatile stock prices. The com-
pany had gone public in late 1971 with an initial burst of enthusi-
asm, but over the next few years the value of its shares fell sharply.
Fallout from the drug scandal contributed to the negative mood, as
two members of the company’s board of directors resigned to avoid
staining their reputation while some advertisers backed away from

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commitments to the magazine. In 1974, PEI’s two-decade anniversary,
the respected business journal Duns Review offered a grim conclu-
sion: “On recent performance, the record of Playboy at twenty seems
one of careless squandering that promises a dismal future.” 54

Part of the problem was Hefner himself. Increasingly bored with
financial aspects of his enterprise, he had withdrawn from corporate
affairs throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. While formulating
broad goals for PEI, he had turned over the empire to associates to
run. “I’m out here playing backgammon. I don’t want to hear from
anybody,” he admitted later. But lacking a strong hand at the helm,
the company had begun to meander off course as it proceeded on
its corporate journey. Criticism of Hefner’s absentee status began
mounting as business experts decried the publisher as being “far
removed from the business side of his empire.” Some PEI execu-
tives concurred. Robert Gutwillig, a vice president for marketing who
was helping run the company, wrote a blistering 1974 memo that
described Hefner as “a chief executive with a whim of iron, disregard
for the welfare of the company, contempt for his employees, and a
lifestyle second only to Louis the Sun King.” At the height of the
drug scandal, Gutwillig and Robert Preuss, president of PEI, even
took the extraordinary step of asking Hefner to step down until the
investigation was complete. In early 1975, Hefner finally was forced
to act, establishing a temporary Office of the President, overseen by
himself and composed of six executives, to run PEI while a search
was launched to secure an experienced business figure to become
president and COO. 55

Thus the first half of the 1970s saw Hefner facing romantic tur-
moil, drug scandal, and financial difficulties in his company. But like
much of America, he stepped back from public problems and turned
inward to concentrate on his personal life. During these same years
he had created a new private refuge far from the Midwest where he
had grown up and launched his career. Success had created fresh
wishes for self-fulfillment, and California now presented a rich new
environment in which to realize them. There Hefner would nourish
the most elaborate, heretical fantasies that he could concoct.

Disneyland for Adults

I n mid-June 1972, the Rolling Stones interrupted their North
I American tour for a brief layover at the Playboy Mansion. Even by
I the jaded standards of Mr. Playboys abode, it was an impressive
performance as Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and friends engaged
in a nonstop, four-day orgy of sex, drugs, and partying. A string
of incidents soon became legend: Jagger flipping up his bathrobe at
poolside and replying “Have at it, luv,” to a lustful girl who had just
blurted out, “I want to bite your ass”; Richards at the center of an
orgy under the dining room table; a bacchanalia in Hefners huge
Roman bath. When the band stumbled off to its next concert dates,
Mary O’Connor, one of Hefner’s key assistants, assessed the damage
in a long memo: a heap of irretrievably burned towels, bedsheets,
and rugs; chairs, couches, and bedspreads stained to ruination; bath-
room fixtures knocked askew and drapes pulled down and destroyed;
plumbing so blocked in one room that plumbers had to cut into the
walls to clear the pipes. Rut the publisher shrugged off the carnage.
Proud of his friendship with the band, he put up a framed poster
inscribed “To Hugh Hefner, for his warm hospitality — from Mick
Jagger and the Stones.” 1

272

DISNEYLAND FOR ADULTS

273

Such incidents typified the revelry of Hefner s life at the mansion,
but he had grown restless in Chicago. The shooting of his television
show, Playboy After Dark, took him to Los Angeles for frequent stints
and his developing relationship with Barbi Benton kept him there.
Then Bobbie Amsteins suicide, along with his breakup with Karen
Christy, further loosened ties to the Windy City. But most impor-
tantly, the allure of Hollywood proved irresistible. He purchased an
estate near Sunset Boulevard to house him during the long West
Coast stays and increasingly gravitated to the sunny, starstruck climate
of Southern California. By 1975, he was living there permanently
and the Chicago mansion, shuttered with a skeleton staff, gradually
became a relic of his past.

The Playboy Mansion West, with its stately manor house and beau-
tiful grounds, became Hefner’s new personal paradise, a Shangri-La
where he and a steady group of friends cavorted in what he termed
a “Disneyland for adults.” For the publisher, this new atmosphere
represented a psychological as well as a geographical shift. “California
is the avant garde of everything that is happening in this country,”
he said. As the new center of Hefner s world, the residence became
more than a home. It served as a kind of social and cultural green-
house for the cultivation of his reputation. Embracing private pursuits
with even greater zeal, Hefner threw himself into group sex with a
coterie of female friends and marathon game-playing sessions with an
informal fraternity of male friends. Facing an American public land-
scape marked by Watergate-era political cynicism, economic reces-
sion, and weariness with social crusades, the publisher retreated into
his private realm and played even harder. Like many Americans in
this era, Hefner turned inward after the public storms and stresses
of the 1960s. 2

Early in the new decade, Hefner made a decision that changed his
life. Tired of staying in his apartment during frequent sojourns in Los
Angeles to tape his television show in the late 1960s, he decided to
buy a house. In late 1970, Barbi Benton found an unusual estate that
immediately captured his imagination — a thirty-room mansion on six

274

MR. PLAYBOY

acres in the heart of Holmby Hills, an exclusive residential area of Los
Angeles, and only a block off the fabled Sunset Boulevard. Originally
built in the 1920s for the family of Arthur Letts, the founder of
Broadway department stores, it now was unoccupied, having been
used for several years by the city as a hospitality center for visiting
dignitaries. Hefner visited the estate with Benton, and immediately
fell in love with it. He purchased it on February 3, 1971, for the price
of $1,050,000.

The house and its grounds offered several attractions to the
Playboy publisher. He was struck immediately by the beautiful
marble panel on the hillside just inside the main gate, with its apt
depiction of Aurora, the Boman goddess of dawn, leading a group
of beautiful young women into a new day. The Tudor Gothic man-
sion sitting atop the hill featured a facade of gray granite adorned
with towers, crenellations, and bay windows with leaded glass. The
hand-carved oak door opened into a two-story great hall flanked by
ornate dining rooms on one side and a large living room with fireplace
and library on the other. A curved double staircase led to the second
floor, where a huge master bedroom suite occupied one end, while a
string of smaller bedrooms swept the length of the mansion. At the
far end of the structure another wing of rooms bent at a right angle
to form an L shape. One of Hefners favorite features was a secret
panel that led down to a hidden wine cellar, an architectural compo-
nent reflecting the fact that the house had been built in 1927 during
Prohibition. 3

Surrounding the mansion were six acres of land with a greenhouse,
gamehouse, guesthouse, sweeping lawns in front and back, and the
largest stand of redwoods in Southern California. Almost immediately,
however, Hefner decided to extensively renovate the grounds to cre-
ate a personal fantasy setting. He wanted a swimming pool and tennis
court, but also sought to create “a veritable Eden with waterfalls, fish
ponds, and a variety of birds and animals running free,” as he put it.
Bon Dirsmith, a landscape architect who brought Hefner s vision to
life, created a hill at the rear perimeter of the backyard to hide the
adjoining property and placed in front of it a complex of waterfalls,
streams, koi pond, and meandering swimming pool, all seemingly
connected. The pool enclosed a rock grotto, while surrounding it
was a tiered flagstone patio with a bar and a bathhouse built of natu-
ral stone. Everything in Dirsmiths design reflected Hefners desire

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to maintain a natural landscape and create what he called “a little
piece of paradise.” The effect was heightened by the addition of a
menagerie of flamingos, peacocks, African cranes, macaws, monkeys,
rabbits, llamas, and dogs, most of which wandered freely among the
lawns and trees. 4

Hefner also ordered a redecoration of the house to create “the
ultimate baronial bachelors pad.” He erased any feminine details
he found. He replaced the original French crystal chandelier in the
great hall, for instance, with a masculine bronze one and enlarged
the master bedroom, adding walnut paneling and a beamed ceiling.
A new, hand-carved circular stairway led up to an attic office that
was also wood-paneled. Nude female figures were incorporated into
a carved stone fireplace and an enormous bed, surrounded by movie
and television screens and electronic gadgetry, became the center-
piece of the room. 5

Hefner forged a strong emotional identification with his new
abode. The man who avoided sunlight in Chicago now “became
entranced with the beautiful azaleas, rhododendrons, and the ferns
and marvelous pines and the various plants that were out there,”
reported Dirsmith. Determined to maintain a natural, organic
ethos on the grounds, Hefner and Dirsmith modeled the grotto on
prehistoric caves in France, embedding in the glass ceiling panels
designs of prehistoric objects and insects trapped in amber. The
publisher demanded paths, walkways, and isolated niches through-
out the property to encourage an atmosphere of intimacy for his
friends. The final result delighted him. “This property seemed to have
been meant for me,” Hefner said later. “A new Playboy Mansion for
a new decade, interconnected to nature as the Chicago Mansion had
never been.” 6

The public opening of the Playboy Mansion West came on
November 20, 1971, at a benefit fund-raiser for the ACLU. Studded
with celebrities such as Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn, Beverly Sills,
Walter Matthau, Angie Dickinson, Bichard Widmark, Yul Brynner,
George McGovern, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the event prompted
a Los Angeles Times reporter to complain, “You could get a pain in
the neck from all the head swiveling.” But such large-scale social
events soon caused disgruntlement among Hefners new neighbors.
In 1972 they drew up a list of complaints — loud music, walkie-talkie
noise at all hours, late-night use of the tennis court, large numbers of

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parked cars clogging the streets, nude young women standing atop the
backyard hill disrupting golfers on the adjacent course — and hired an
attorney to negotiate with the publisher prior to taking legal action.
Hefner declared his intention to be a good neighbor and agreed to
modify the offensive practices. 7

As the mansion got up and running, unaccustomed problems
tormented the staff. Not long after it opened, for instance, Hefners
troop of squirrel monkeys created an uproar. Following tr a ining
advice from experts at the San Diego Zoo, groundskeepers initially
kept them on long ropes and fed them at regular times at the base of
a huge redwood in the backyard. After several weeks, they released
them and the monkeys hung around in anticipation of the feeding.
But then the simian brigade, perched high in the redwood branches,
alertly observed a huge buffet table being set out in a neighbor s yard
for a wedding. A furious phone call informed mansion personnel that
some two dozen hairy raiders had come swinging out of the trees and
were eating everything in sight, and a posse of gardeners, butlers,
security people, electricians, and carpenters went charging down the
hill to retrieve the miscreants. Fortunately, Hefner s large kitchen was
able to replace the pilfered food, but the monkeys were put in giant
enclosures thereafter. 8

Despite such mishaps, nearly all visitors to the Playboy Mansion
West saw it as a fantasy come to life. A jaded reporter for the Los
Angeles Herald Examiner, who had seen many beautiful residences in
Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, admitted that “seldom do you see anyone
short of the aristocracy living in such baronial splendor.” Anthony
Haden-Guest, in a 1973 article for Rolling Stone, described

a mullioned slab of Old Englishry, a gray gleam of ersatz
granite in the Southern California sunlight. To the back the
image dissolves, re-forms. Sexy vicarage metamorphoses to
miniature Versailles. Gibbons swing and chatter in the trees
while a couple of house guests foozle with croquet hoops; a
quintet of East African cranes lope up a handmade hill and an
associate movie-producer hopefully pursues a trio of cuties.
Mottled Japanese carp float on one side of a bridge, and on
the other, in the bathing pool, another cutie, with the left
cheek of her bikini bottom cut into a heart shape, floats on an
air mattress.

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The actor Peter O’Toole, after strolling the grounds with Hefner,
Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward, offered a snappier summary:
“This is the way God would have done it if he had the money.” 9

Hefner adored his new residence. While savoring its sheer physi-
cal beauty, he also imagined it radiating a mystique that was equal
parts erotic freedom, material affluence, and old Hollywood glamour.
The publisher saw it not only as a haven for pleasure, but as his ticket
into the movie-star community that he had idolized since childhood.
He planned for his new abode, with its spacious grounds and sumptu-
ous manor house, to become a site for recapturing some of the charm
and allure associated with the golden age of American filmmaking.
Indeed, as Hefner threw lavish parties and cultivated the celebrities
of the silver screen, he became a Hollywood fixture. 10

Profoundly satisfied with his new California dwelling, he once
answered a query about vacations by saying, “I go from the house
to the Jacuzzi.” In 1975 he lovingly shepherded into the pages of
Playboy a long article titled “Playboy Mansion West.” Describing
the property as a “new paradise by the Pacific, a contemporary
Shangri-La for work and play,” it took the reader on an extended,
step-by-step tour through the house and grounds. Replete with
evocative prose and dozens of lush photographs, it reflected Hefner’s
emotional blueprint for his new home. The article stressed its atmo-
sphere of liberation and fantasy, and its “ethereal, dreamlike quality.”
It described Hefner’s circle of friends, “a free-form floating family —
maybe 30 or 40 regulars, who come and go, group and regroup in
ever-changing combinations” — as they made the residence “a sec-
ond home.” It pointed out Hefner’s new affinity for nature, sunshine,
and daytime working hours, joking that “Hef discovered he couldn’t
do a thing about the ridiculous hours the sun kept so he decided
to meet it halfway.” In both pictures and prose, it illuminated the
mansion’s attraction for movie stars and entertainers by noting
the presence of figures such as Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford,
Raquel Welch, Tony Curtis, Jim Rrown, Jack Nicholson, Groucho
Marx, James Caan, Clint Eastwood, and many others. Finally, of
course, the article rounded out Hefner’s vision of the mansion by
depicting the beautiful, unclad, and uninhibited young women who
pervaded the property. Visitors to the Playboy Mansion West, it con-
cluded, “have nothing to do but relax and enjoy the wonders of this
Disneyland for adults.” 11

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MR. PLAYBOY

In fact, the Playboy publisher hosted innumerable gaudy social
events at the mansion throughout the 1970s. Hefners longtime love
of boxing led to elaborate “Fight Night” parties for bouts such as the
1974 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman contest in Zaire (where Ali
thrilled Hefner by saying hello on the air), and the “Thrilla in Manila”
contest between Ali and Joe Frazier in 1975. Hefners birthday also
provided the occasion for yearly parties. One of the most notable
came on his fiftieth in 1976, when his friends put together a sur-
prise roast where a group of comedians and close friends made fun of
the publisher before a large crowd. Two years later, Hefners birthday
prompted the “Schlong Show,” a bawdy send-up of Chuck Barris’s
television hit, The Gong Show. A number of mansion regulars sang,
danced, told jokes, and entertained as a panel composed of Hefner,
Peter Lawford, and comedian Alan Kent awarded points and rang the
gong on particularly awful acts. On his fifty-fifth birthday, in an elabo-
rate set in the backyard, friends presented the Calamity Awards, a
satire on the Academy Awards that focused on the foibles of mansion
insiders. Roman Polanski, for example, received the “Outstanding
Achievement in Box Office Disasters Award” for a recent movie. The
director had fled the country because of a scandal involving an under
age girl, so his award was accepted by James Caan’s eleven-year-old
daughter, who walked up to the microphone and brought the house down
with this line: “I’m sorry, my husband couldn’t make it tonight.” 12
A long string of parties and social events shaped the regular cal-
endar of life at Hefner’s mansion. New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day,
Halloween, and the announcement of the Playmate of the Year
became standard fare while a pajama soiree, the Midsummer Night’s
Dream Party, became a particular favorite of many mansion regu-
lars. Hefner was especially thrilled by the Playmate Reunion, on the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the magazine’s founding, when 136 former
Playmate centerfolds gathered at the California mansion for a week-
end celebration in September 1979. Weekly movie nights, attended
by several dozen guests, filled out the mansion’s social schedule, as
did numerous fund-raising events for charities. Hefner had special
enthusiasm for a gathering in the summer of 1978 to restore the
famous Hollywood sign that sat in the hills north of Los Angeles,
which he described as “Hollywood’s Eiffel Tower.” 13

As its mystique spread, the Playboy Mansion West became
the setting for several ABC -TV specials focusing on Hefner and the

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Playboy lifestyle. In April 1977, for instance, ABC televised Playboys
Playmate Party , hosted by the comedian Dick Martin and featuring
appearances by Bill Cosby, Bobert Culp, James Caan, and Arnold
Schwarzenegger as well as Hefner and an assortment of Playmates.
Two years later, in November 1979, Bichard Dawson hosted The
Playboy Roller Disco and Pajama Party on ABC. With musical enter-
tainment provided by Chuck Mangione and the Village People, most
of the activity focused on Hefner and several dozen skimpily clad
Playmates roller skating to disco music on the tennis courts, dancing
in the mansion s great hall, and lounging by the swimming pool and
grotto. Such shows drew high ratings, but many critics found them to
be little more than extended commercials for Hefner and Playboy . 14

The mansion also hosted many political events that reflected its
owners attraction to liberal causes. In the spring of 1976, he hosted a
fund-raiser for California governor Jerry Brown during his race for
the presidency in the Democratic primaries . The following year he did
the same for Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, who swept to a reelec-
tion victory. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws (NORML) also continued to attract Hefners support with sev-
eral fund-raisers while the publisher received NAACP Image Awards
in the latter 1970s. In 1978, a Playboy Foundation gathering in behalf
of the Equal Rights Amendment brought in thousands of dollars and
featured Dr. Benjamin Spock as the guest of honor. 15

Thus a public image began to take shape of the Playboy Mansion
West as a gathering place for Hollywood’s beautiful people and a pri-
vate playground for the Playboy publisher, his friends, and a legion of
beautiful female companions. But the popular impression of Hefners
hedonistic Eden in Southern California, no matter how extravagant,
could not match what actually happened behind its walls. In real life,
Mr. Playboy enjoyed a private realm of sensual indulgence and exu-
berant play in the 1970s that dwarfed anything he had experienced in
earlier years. It would have boggled the imagination of his public.

The December 1977 issue of Playboy featured “Playboys Playmate
House Party,” which described the beguiling “party after the party”
following a recent ABC television show. It followed seven Playmates

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as they cavorted about the mansion grounds, often in the nude,
having pillow fights, sunbathing, relaxing in the sauna, shooting pool,
and finally joining Hefner to enjoy a lobster and wine buffet. But
then came the piece de resistance — a “champagne celebration” in the
grotto Jacuzzi where the publisher and the naked females relaxed in
the bubbling waters, casually intertwined with chilled champagne at
hand. The article described this scene as “a perfect candlelit capper
to what has been a vintage day for Hef and the girls.” With broad
winks to the reader, the article hinted at what had become a reality:
Hefner had emerged at the center of a group-sex scene. 16

The editor had slept with a host of women over the last two
decades, of course, and often concurrently, but seldom together. In
the case of his “serious” girlfriends, they never shared his bed with
other females. Now, however, group-sex scenes became the norm at
his West Coast Shangri-La. At the same time, Hefner intensified his
long interest in game playing — card games, board games, pinball and
video games — into a passion. The new mansion became, in his words,
“both a swingers paradise and a sanctuary” where fun and games,
quite literally, became the stuff of his life. Later, he described this
period as “part of the ‘if that’s all there is, then let’s keep on dancing’
attitude that took hold after Bobbie Arnstein’s death.” During this
escapist interlude, “I was celebrating my survival, if nothing else.” 17

The unrestrained sexual atmosphere at the 1970s mansion
quickly achieved legendary status among those privy to its daily
life. By about 1973, Barbi Benton was absent for long stretches
doing television spots or touring with her band, and “there were
plenty of Playmates and Bunnies eager to fill my time,” Hefner
noted later. An atmosphere of sexual abandon began to envelop the
mansion grounds as notorious lotharios such as Warren Beatty, Jack
Nicholson, and James Caan were regular visitors along with a con-
stant stream of Playmates, ambitious models, and aspiring actresses.
Unending seductions and uninhibited sex became the normal order
of things. Beatty, for example, was notorious for his sexual conquests.
According to an observer, the stunningly handsome, soft-voiced
movie star would simply approach a young woman, shake her hand,
and quietly say, “Hi, I’m Warren,” at which point she would melt.
The filmmaker Michael Trikilis once was having sex with a beautiful
young woman in one of the gamehouse bedrooms when the door sud-
denly opened and Hefner stood there. Trikilis froze, fearing that the

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publisher might be angry, but he calmly walked by, patted him on the
butt, and said, “Hi, Mikey.” “Couples could be found coupling on
the Mansion grounds at almost any time of the day or night,” Hefner
described. “It was an Eden that prompted pleasure seekers to leave
their inhibitions at the gate.” 18

The grotto became the erotic shrine at the center of this pleasure
temple. Its sensual atmosphere presented both an outdoor feeling of
nature and an intimate feeling of cavelike seclusion. With soothing
jets of water, an array of overstuffed cushions scattered about, soft
candlelight, and piped-in music — all hidden behind a waterfall mask-
ing the entrance to the larger pool outside — the grotto appeared like
a set from a romantic movie. Guests responded to the allure of this
magical spot, and it was not unusual in the 1970s to see people making
love there in various combinations at all hours. 19

But the real erotic energy at the mansion radiated from Hefner
and a bevy of young women who established a highly unconven-
tional relationship throughout the late 1970s. The “Mansion Misses,”
as he termed them, became his regular sexual partners in group
scenes occurring occasionally in the grotto but most often upstairs
in his master bedroom. This steady group of young women included
Hope Olson, Patti McGuire, Marilou York, Marcy Hanson, Daina
House, Susan Kiger, Alison Reynolds, Debbie Svensk Jensen, and
Monique St. Pierre. Hefner felt excited and liberated by a situation
where “instead of having to choose one girl over another on any given
evening, I simply chose them all — and the more the merrier.” 20

His consorts agreed. The Mansion Misses saw the group sex as
an exciting erotic adventure that freed them from traditional moral
restraints. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to act out the
fantasies we all have,” explained Svensk. Marcy Hanson described
it as “a dream world” where participants “could just have fun and
experience everything without any rules to follow,” where they
had “the freedom to express ourselves in every way that felt good to
us, without being labeled evil or promiscuous.” 21

Monique St. Pierre was especially eloquent on this point. Upon
joining Hefner and several girls in his bed for the first time, she was
overwhelmed:

I remember holding hands . . . and one another. And gradually
the warmth grew and grew into a tremendous sexual energy

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MR. PLAYBOY

that finally swept us along faster and faster, and finally over the
edge. I didn’t even know what I was doing, I wasn’t even aware
of myself as being separate from the others. ... It was the most
amazing sex I’ve ever had. But the most amazing thing about it
was that it wasn’t really about sex. It was about life.

St. Pierre experienced a kind of euphoria where she “felt so free
to let down every guard that you had ever learned in your entire
life. Nothing seemed wrong.” It made her feel intensely alive and
she described a kind of spiritual experience — ”a feast, a festival, an
adventure, an awakening. It transformed me.” 22

The female participants in this unusual erotic arrangement expe-
rienced a special bonding that created intimate relationships and
blunted jealousies. With no strings attached to this experiment
in physical pleasure, they became close friends and enjoyed one
another’s company with no one having a special claim on Hefner.
Several of them described it as “a big happy family” or a “big happy
sorority” where the ultimate agenda was to break the rules and have
fun. “We were such good friends with each other that we were just
showing our love for one another, not in a lesbian way at all, but just in
that we cared so much for each other and for Hef,” explained Alison
Reynolds. “We all became really close friends up there in Hef’s bed-
room.” In fact, the friendships were so strong that they would go on
to last for decades thereafter. 23

But Hefner did not limit himself to the Mansion Misses.
Throughout the late 1970s he regularly engaged in sporadic sexual
encounters with a variety of “Personal Playmates,” as he liked to call
them. This group consisted of women he dated seriously for a short time,
such as Lillian Mueller, the sultry Norwegian beauty who became the
1976 Playmate of the Year. It included a number of young women who
posed for Playboy — Ashley Cox, Nikki Thomas, Janice Pennington,
Christie Maddox, Michelle Drake, Gig Gangel, Sivi Aberg, among
them. It contained others who were simply attracted to the sexual
excitement of the mansion, such as a beautiful University of Michigan
undergraduate who sought out Hefner as a kind of fantasy fulfill-
ment and spent several sensual weekends with him at the mansion.
Moreover, the publisher sporadically engaged in “swinging” sessions
that included his favorite girlfriend of the moment along with cou-
ples such as Orson and Denise Mozes. As Hefner observed, after

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breaking up with Barbi Benton he devoted himself “to a far more
open lifestyle, not to any one person, but to many. There were too
many delicious possibilities for me to contemplate limiting myself to
only one or two.” 24

Throughout this uninhibited period, however, Hefner did main-
tain a serious romantic relationship of sorts. In the fall of 1976, just
after the final departure of Benton, he met a shy, nineteen-year-old
blonde from a very traditional background. Sondra Theodore had
been born and raised in San Bernardino, where she had been in the
Girl Scouts, taught Sunday school, and acted in local theater produc-
tions. After a year in college she had moved to Los Angeles to pursue
an acting career when she accompanied a girlfriend to a party at the
Playboy Mansion. Awkward and nervous, she was quietly nursing a
drink at the bar when Hefner appeared and put her at ease with his
calm, joking manner. After a tour of the grounds, they played pinball
for a time and then danced to a slow, romantic song. Then the pub-
lisher left her to attend to his other guests but promised to return. He
did, saying, “Well, IVe looked the whole party over and can’t think of
anyone I’d rather spend the rest of the evening with.” Swept off her
feet, Theodore spent the night with Hefner and over the next several
weeks began a romantic relationship that would last for five years. 25

Theodore became a fixture at the mansion. Hopelessly in love
with Hefner, the vivacious young woman attended to his wants and
needs in every way possible. She developed an interest in old movies
and big band music, faithfully accompanied him to social gather-
ings and public appearances, and played his favorite tunes on the
big Steinway piano in the living room. She gushed about her boy-
friend to the press, recounting that he had “such a boyish charm
you just want to cuddle him up and love him. He’s witty, he’s funny,
he guides you, takes care of you, yet he’s the keeper of his house.”
Hefner responded to her sweet, romantic nature, describing her as
a “fresh faced, wholesome, gawky kid with a tomboyish charm that
captured my heart — that made me feel like a boy again.” He bought
her an expensive necklace that spelled out “Baby Blue” in diamonds,
after the Barry White song of the same name that they had danced
to that first evening. He also chose her as Playboy ’ s Playmate of the
Month in July 1977. 26

But Hefner had no intention of giving up the other women in his
life. “I was really committed to non-commitment,” he said, and while

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he cared for Theodore, it was not deep enough to create a serious,
long-term love affair. “She was a special girl, but not the only girl,”
Hefner noted bluntly. The publisher had no intention of commit-
ting one-on-one to anybody, and it reflected his desire to avoid the
burden of obligation that went with a steady, exclusive girlfriend.
“It was the same kind of thing that you get with marriage. Then you
have to make decisions not simply on the basis of what you want to
do, but what you’re expected to do,” he explained. “I don’t think
I was avoiding emotional involvement, but I was avoiding some of
the responsibilities of a one-on-one relationship .” 27

Theodore tried to take this in stride, accepting Hefner on his own
terms and overlooking his dalliances with other women. But it was
not easy. She told others — and obviously, herself — that she knew
what she was getting into and that sex with many women was part
of his lifestyle, his very identity. “I love him too much to throw it out
the window over a silly thing like him seeing another girl once in a
while,” she told a newspaper interviewer. “The others are just adven-
tures.” At the same time, she yearned for a deeper, more permanent
relationship. “If he were to ask me to marry him tomorrow, I’d do
it,” she admitted publicly. Thus she found herself caught between
conflicting desires — to be happy or to make Hefner happy. “I shed a
lot of tears, and it was very painful at times,” she admitted, but she
gamely acknowledged a basic fact: “I knew I wasn’t going to change
him, so if I was going to love a man like him, I had to accept what
he was all about .” 28

Theodore also struggled to be accepted by the other females in
Hefner’s bedroom coterie. Initially, they saw her as an interloper who
was conniving to have the publisher all to herself. They played mean
tricks on her and froze her out at every opportunity. But Theodore
persisted, constantly telling the others that “if we love him we will try
to make him happy, and he likes harmony.” She soon won them over
and became a full-fledged member of the sorority. In fact, so complete
was her devotion to Hefner that she began to set up group sexual
activities to please him. According to another member of the sorority,
“She would almost be his little gofer. He would want to get someone,
and she would get the girl into the scene .” 29

Eventually, however, the strain of sharing Hefner began to
wear on Theodore. With the man she adored sleeping with many
other women, often in her presence, the jealousy and pain began

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to build up. His relationship with Heather Waite, a gorgeous blond
beauty queen, became especially distressing from 1978 to 1980
as the two women took turns, with one being at the mansion on
certain days and the remaining days reserved for the other. Theodore s
crying spells became more frequent, as did her arguments with
Hefner, and she gradually began to dull her bubbly personality with
alcohol and drugs. She had maintained her own apartment since dat-
ing Hefner, and increasingly she went there to escape. Her close
friends in the sorority grew worried as she numbed her pain chemi-
cally. Theodore admitted that “the lifestyle started to take a bit of
a toll on me,” and when they finally broke up in 1980 “it was very
difficult on me, very difficult. And I had a lot of anger and I felt
betrayed.” 30

Despite such emotional complications, Hefner radiated a vibrant,
magnetic sexual vitality throughout the last half of the 1970s that
seemed to overwhelm all problems. He appeared as a man with an
insatiable appetite for sex and little respect for erotic boundaries. At
the same time, his physical intensity was accompanied by a gentle,
romantic quality that made sex more than just physical pleasure. “Hef
was the catalyst, he was the power source of all that energy. He was
exuding it, generating it, building it, orchestrating it,” Monique
St. Pierre recounted. “He was incredibly gentle and loving, but also
incredibly wild.” Marcy Hanson described him as “like a little boy
under a Christmas tree when it came to sex — so playful and adven-
turesome, so enthused by every new creative thing you came up with
in bed.” 31

Hefners sexual passions occasionally produced curious situations.
His love of slathering baby oil on his girlfriends during lovemaking
would create problems for them in removing the sticky mess in their
hair the next day. During a raucous lovemaking session with Sondra
Theodore, he accidentally swallowed one of her “Benwa Balls,” a
sexual toy that consisted of two metal balls inserted inside a woman
to enhance her physical sensations. He fell back on the bed, choking
and unable to breathe, and was about to lose consciousness when she
squeezed his chest and finally dislodged the sphere. The incident
frightened them, but later that evening he made light of the trauma
with friends. At the point of expiring from inhaling a sex toy, he joked,
“The first thing that went through my mind was, is this what it has all
led to? The second thing was, what will all the newspaper headlines

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in the world say tomorrow morning? The third was, are we get t ing
this on videotape?” A short time later, Theodore had the offen d ing
Benwa Ball framed against a velvet purple heart with a caption: “Lest
We Forget.” 32

The aura of Hefners sexual prowess allowed him to enhance his
public persona at every opportunity. Delighted by the growing legend,
he observed, “It wasn’t difficult to figure out that the most successful
sex object I’d created was me. It was a role I was very comfortable
playing.” When commenting to the press about his reputation as a
Casanova, pride occasionally shaded into vanity, even crassness. “I have
built here what could be viewed as a perpetual woman machine,” he
commented in a 1978 interview with the Chicago Tribune. “Women,
although they say they like a faithful and monogamous man, are very
attracted to a man who has had a lot of romantic experiences. The
more experienced you are, the more desirable you are to a woman.”
Reveling in the transgressions, the uninhibited pleasure-seeking that
defined his sexual life in the late 1970s, Hefner described it as the
period when “I was least my mother’s son.” 33

But Hefner’s grand experiment in liberated sexuality made up
only one side of mansion life in the 1970s. His other passion con-
sisted of game playing, which he elevated to the level of obsession.
Along with a fraternity of male friends dubbed “The Rabbit Pack” by
one wag — it included John Dante, Joe DeCarlo, Bernie Cornfeld,
Shel Silverstein, Gene Schacove, Jim Brown, Lee Wolfberg, John
Rockwell, Berry Gordy, Billy Eisenberg, Michael Trikilis, and James
Caan — he engaged in competitions that would last for hours, or
even days. Monopoly was a favorite, but pinball became an even
bigger addiction. The gamehouse on the mansion grounds soon
grew stuffed with the latest pinball machines — Bally even issued a
special model with images of Hef, Theodore, and Patti McGuire —
and became the site of marathon tournaments. Competition and
conviviality mixed in equal measure. “You rotated and there were
so many machines, and people would sit on the couch and talk and
you could run back and forth and talk and play the game,” a girlfriend
described. 34

In Hefner’s hierarchy of pastimes in the 1970s, however, backgam-
mon moved to the very top. He had been introduced to this ancient
game early in the decade and his interest inspired a quartet of articles
in the March 1973 Playboy that explored the history of the game,

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its contemporary attraction, strategies of play, and the most stylish
boards and gear. Hefner really got hooked, however, after attend-
ing a 1972 world championship tournament in Las Vegas. Attracted
by the intense, rapid-fire competition of the game and its veneer of
jet-setting glamour and cosmopolitanism, he began to play seriously.
Backgammon became a significant part of life at the mansion with
games of varying size and duration going on almost all of the time.
Celebrities, friends, high-rolling gamblers, and serious players joined
Hefner in these activities and large amounts of money were won
and lost. 35

The mansion soon attracted world-class players such as Billy
Eisenberg, Tom Gilbert, and Oswald Jacoby. Hefner also began
frequenting tournaments and enjoyed some success, once beating
Tim Holland, a world-ranked player. As backgammon mania set in,
according to Eisenberg, a group of regulars competed constantly as
“Hef and the boys started playing for 12, 18, 24, 36, 48 hours at a
time.” Some of the games got out of hand, with unskilled players
losing great amounts of money and debts going unpaid. Eventually,
Hefner was forced to end such games in the interests of harmony at
his Southern California Eden. At the same time, he became a major
investor in Pips, a private backgammon club in Hollywood that flour-
ished for several years. 36

The game became a consuming passion for Hefner. He found it
exciting, noting that it had “a confrontational quality about it that
really got the adrenaline going.” Focusing both his considerable
powers of intelligence and energy, he threw himself into the games
and grew adept at many of its subtle strategies. Friends marveled at
how, on more than one occasion, he would sit at the backgammon
board for two or three days straight without food or drink except for
a steady supply of Pepsis and an occasional dexie. “Hef had the focus
of a laser in those days,” reported one observer. Backgammon even
trumped sex on occasion in the Hefner universe. One time a beautiful
blond Playmate spent several hours lolling about as she read maga-
zines, munched on snacks, and chatted with the staff as she waited
for some romantic attention from the publisher. But he stayed holed
up in the library engaged in a marathon backgammon contest. She
finally gave up around 5 a.m., gave him a goodnight kiss, and left
to go to bed. Hef looked up briefly to quip, “Greater love hath no
backgammon player,” and went back to rolling the dice. 37

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Hefners obsession with games in the 1970s reflected, of course,
Playboy’s broader social philosophy of pleasure-seeking. But it also
appealed to more personal impulses. First, they provided lighthearted
distraction to a man who had been utterly absorbed in his work for
two decades. “The ability to enjoy such frivolous pastimes is part of
what life ought to be all about,” he said in 1974. But pinball and back-
gammon also offered a framework for sociability to someone whose
shy nature did not make for a natural bon vivant. “He was great with
games and fun with games. That’s when you get him relaxed and his
personality really comes out,” Sondra Theodore commented. “He
shares himself with his friends.” Nor was it surprising that Hefner, one
of the great business and journalistic successes in postwar America,
savored the competition and relished winning. Finally, games pro-
vided an outlet for the publishers burning energy. Having pulled
away from much day-to-day direction of the Playboy enterprise,
he found that backgammon offered, in the words of Eisenberg, an
opportunity to deploy his “restless imagination and intellect, and . . .
a flight from boredom.” 38

Thus Hefner’s private pursuit of pleasure in the 1970s marked
a shift, both in intensity and in kind, from his earlier style of life.
While the revelry at the Chicago mansion in the 1960s had aimed to
revitalize American society, the hedonism of his California Shangri-
La during the following decade seemed to map out an escape route.
Personal life had become not an enhancement to public life, but an
alternative. Once more, however, Hefner’s growing preoccupation
with private endeavors and states of mind had a larger cultural reso-
nance. As many commentators noted, not only the Playboy publisher
but large segments of the American population seemed to be turning
inward.

Ill

In 1976, Tom Wolfe published an essay that captured an essential
impulse of the new era. The 1970s, he wrote, “will come to be known
as the Me Decade.” In the aftermath of the upheavals of the 1960s,
great numbers of Americans had embraced spiritual revivals, popular
therapies, physical fitness, self-help movements, hippie communes,
and sexual liberation in a cultural groundswell promoting personal

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self-fulfillment. This powerful wave of introspection involved
“changing ones personality — remaking, remodeling, elevating, and
polishing ones very self and observing, studying, and doting on it,”
wrote Wolfe. Seeping from the discourse of religion, counseling,
physical exercise, and many other endeavors were the phrases of
the age: “Lets talk about me . . . Lets find the Real Me . . . Lets get
rid of all the hypocrisies and impedimenta and false modesties that
obscure the Real Me.” Self-gratification had become the order of
the day. 39

Many social observers concurred, seeing in the 1970s a great
shift toward the cultivation of personal life. Rooks with revealing
titles — The Culture of Narcissism, America’s Quest for the Ideal
Self The Pursuit of Loneliness, Habits of the Heart: Individualism
and Commitment in American Life, The Fall of Public Man — poked
and prodded the American psyche and produced similar diagnoses:
Americans were displaying all the symptoms of an advanced case
of self-absorption. As one critic put it, the modern citizen increas-
ingly “demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless,
perpetually unsatisfied desire.” 40

In many ways, Hefner and his increasingly indulgent Playboy life-
style became a symbol of the “Me Decade.” Instead of writing the
Playboy Philosophy or speaking at public forums on the moral impli-
cations of Playboy, he now played marathon backgammon games,
orchestrated group-sex sessions, and convened charity fund-raisers
featuring Hollywood’s beautiful people. Instead of taking to the air-
waves to debate William F. Ruckley and Harvey Cox on changing
social values, he now headlined televised Playboy parties that cele-
brated his celebrity lifestyle. To many, Hefner embodied the modem
culture of personal self-fulfillment.

Hefners statements in the 1970s certainly encouraged the con-
nection. He intoned the “Let’s talk about me” mantra, telling one
interviewer, “I know there’s a tremendous amount of fascination,
projection, and fantasy [among the public] related to the life I’m
living” and describing it as “an adventure in finding a better life-
style.” He insisted that material wealth and pleasures of the flesh, in
fact, would bring contentment. “What really produces happiness is
self-fulfillment, doing what you really enjoy doing,” he claimed, then
added that he “didn’t know anybody who was fulfilling their personal
aspirations to the extent that I’ve been able to.” In a 1974 Playboy

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Interview, he insisted that personal needs trumped social expectations.
“What I’m saying is that every one of us needs a personal sense of
identity and self-worth in order to function satisfactorily in society.”
And to those who might disapprove of his lifestyle, he offered a blunt
rejoinder: “My feeling, frankly, is that I earned it and I have a right to
do with it exactly as I damn please.” 41

In 1979 Christie Hefner, by then working for Playboy, confirmed
her father’s link to the “Me Generation” impulse. “It is now perfectly
acceptable to say, out loud, what I care about is myself,” she con-
tended in an interview. “I think what Wolfe calls the ‘me decade,’
the whole sense of self-emphasis, self-enrichment, all of that is very
much . . . inherent in the original concept in the magazine and the
life that Hefner’s been living.” As her father put it, the 1970s was an
era when “I was savoring my personal life as never before.” 42

A steady stream of publicity highlighted his hedonistic life of
personal pleasure. The 1972 New York Times Magazine quoted his
description of his glamorous new Hollywood mansion: “My house is
an extension of me and my personality. It’s a controlled environment
which lets me do the things I like to do.” According to Newsweek,
Hefner had shaped his magazine into “a mainstream guide to living
well in the me-decade.” The Chicago Sun-Times argued that Hefner’s
secret for well-being lay in the fact that “he has thought about the
way he would like to live and then has gone ahead and lived that way.”
People magazine, in a 1974 cover story, observed that the continuous
round of fun and games at the mansion embodied his “deliberate
change in lifestyle.” 43

Playboy itself increasingly became a showcase for Hefner’s per-
sonal life. The twentieth anniversary issue in January 1974 show-
cased him as a larger-than-life subject of the Playboy Interview. “I
can say that in many ways, he is even a more remarkable figure than
his legend,” related the interviewer, who went on to describe his
“staggering” energy, “overwhelming” powers of concentration, and
“incredibly compelling personality.” Growing numbers of feature
articles, such as the “Playboy Mansion West” and “Playboy’s Playmate
House Party,” revolved around his private endeavors. Most strikingly,
in July 1977 Playboy debuted a regular new feature, “The World of
Playboy,” which focused on Hefner and his activities — meeting celeb-
rities, appearing in the media, partying at the mansion. In September
1978, for example, it described him arriving in the Bahamas for the

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opening of a new Playboy casino and his fifty-second gala birthday
party with glowing prose and abundant photographs. 44

Ultimately, Hefner strode out of the pages of Playboy in the 1970s
as a swinging icon of self-gratification. Even more than in earlier
decades, he became, in his words, “a guy people can fantasize about
and see as a representative of the good life.” While the press charac-
terized his hedonistic lifestyle as Playboy’ s “most important fantasy —
or is it reality?” a delighted Hefner fed the hype, declaring, “Well, the
major sex object created by Playboy over the last 25 years happens
to be me.” 45

Hefners personal image reached a new high when he hosted
Saturday Night Live , NBC’s hip, satirical new comedy revue, on
October 15, 1977. From the opening monologue, when he sang a sly
version of the old hit song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” while decked
out in red silk pajamas, through his appearance in several skits — trying
to seduce skeptical cast member Jane Curtin on his famous round bed,
dispensing the Playboy Philosophy to attentive students while dressed
as Socrates, leading a space mission as Captain Macho — Hefner vali-
dated his central position in American mass culture. His appearance
proved to be one of the most popular in the history of the show, and
it took him to a new level of personal celebrity. 46

Yet the reaction to Hefner s brand of personal hedonism reflected
the polarization emerging in American society by mid-decade. The
continued appeal of Playboy indicated substantial public approval, as
did Hefners Saturday Night Live role and a host of awards and other
appearances. Playboy’s twenty-fifth anniversary in late 1978 and
1979 also reflected its popularity. An extravagant anniversary issue
was over four hundred pages long, filled with advertising, and loaded
with pieces by heavyweights such as John Updike and Gore Vidal
and an interview with Marlon Brando. It also crowned the aptly
named Candy Loving as the twenty-fifth anniversary Playmate. ABC
televised two prime-time specials — one a history of Hefner and
Playboy, narrated by George Plimpton, and another titled Playboy’s
Roller Disco and Pajama Party — that pulled down high ratings. The
mansion hosted a Playmate Beunion that garnered much publicity,
while Hefner accepted a star on the famous Walk of Fame from the
Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. 47

In addition, commentators offered positive assessments of the
Playboy legacy. They placed Hefner alongside Elvis Presley as a giant

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figure in modern popular culture, praised him as an embodiment of
the American dream, and commended his leadership of the modem
sexual revolution. Newsweek described Playboy as “an institution”
after years of “cheerleading for sex and the good life.” Chicago
mayor Michael A. Bilandic even proclaimed a “Hugh M. Hefner
Day” in a tribute that acclaimed his “ideas and determination and . . .
outstanding contributions to the business world.” 48

At the same time, Hefners flamboyant 1970s image found a
frostier reception than in earlier decades. Growing numbers of
critics viewed Mr. Playboys opulent lifestyle as a cruel hoax in an
era when many Americans were struggling to maintain a decent
standard of living amid economic recession and inflation. Faced
with shrinking jobs, rising prices, and a mounting energy crisis,
many Americans saw Hefners hedonism, in the words of one, as
“out of touch with today’s reality, a decadent, indulgent relic of easy
times and easy money.” Playboy’s vision may have been attractive in
the past, but in “these days of hunger, war, terrorism, joblessness,
economic hardship, and despoliation of the planet,” wrote one col-
umnist, “ Playboy and the materialistic American Dream it is selling
are becoming anachronisms.” Even Bob Greene of the Chicago
Sun-Times , an old Hefner friend, suggested that the publisher’s
lifestyle proved only that “you never really had to grow up if you
didn’t want to.” 49

More ideological critiques also took aim. Conservatives, who had
begun to organize throughout America at the grassroots level by the
mid-1970s, offered particularly strident attacks. Holding aloft an
old-fashioned standard of personal character and rectitude, they
assailed Hefner for fomenting moral decline, social degeneration,
and personal licentiousness. M. J. Sobran blasted the publisher in
the National Review for promoting a shallow narcissism and insidi-
ous moral relativism that undercut firm notions of right and wrong.
That so many Americans had come to see their moral standards as
“subjective” and grown reluctant to “impose” them on the rest of
society “is a measure of Hugh Hefner’s success,” he lamented. George
Will rebuked Hefner as a purveyor of vulgar “adolescent fantasies.”
In a long 1975 interview, the conservative columnist sparred with
Hefner over the question of displaying sexuality. Was anything out
of bounds? Will inquired. Would Playboy depict bestiality? When
Hefner replied that such a scene would be degrading, the interviewer

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pressed him: “There are some things that are objectively degrading? . . .
I’m trying to find something that will cause Hefner to put his foot
down. And I want to know on what ground it is.” 50

Other conservatives embroidered these complaints. They vilified
Playboy for prompting readers to “imagine the insanely debauched
good time Hef is having.” They portrayed Hefner as an antique hip-
ster mouthing the slogans of 1960s-style liberation, with one car-
toon depicting a Playboy Bunny as a wrinkled old woman sitting in
a rocking chair. Others waxed indignant about the modern epidemic
of divorce, illegitimate births, alcoholism, welfare abuse, venereal
disease, and drug abuse that could be traced to Playboy’s message of
“instant gratification; if it feels good, do it.” Even worse was his profit-
making from pushing “gay rights, legal abortions, legalization of pot,
and a myriad of other social sicknesses.” Ultimately, conservatives
agreed, Hefner symbolized the moral degradations of animal sex:
“the girls — unblemished, defying gravity, they are kneeling, bending,
reclining declarations of all Playboy was or probably ever will be.” In
the face of this onslaught, the publisher could only lament, “For some
tradition-oriented people I represent the devil without horns.” 51
But certain progressive analysts also criticized Hefner by the
mid-1970s, describing his sex-and-games sensibility as vacuous,
materialistic, and chauvinist. Rolling Stone, the official voice of the
counterculture, sneered at Hefner’s world of “adolescent fantasy,”
while some liberal newspapers mocked Playboys “acquisitive chic”
and “consumerism run amok.” The advance of the women’s move-
ment had rendered Hefner’s sexual ethic “absurd, embarrassing,
or irrelevant,” contended one editorial. Even the sexual revolution
had gone sour under Playboy’s leadership, concluded the Christian
Science Monitor. The crusade for freedom to enjoy sex had deterio-
rated into “a mass-media venture in the skin trade” and a frivolous
pursuit of thrills as “D. H. Lawrence was succeeded by Hugh Hefner,
and Lady Chatterley ended up as a centerfold.” 52

Thus Hefner’s quest for self-fulfillment in the 1970s came at a
price. For much of the previous two decades, Mr. Playboys lifestyle
had reflected many mainstream hopes and aspirations in an expand-
ing, affluent, optimistic America. But now it triggered disgruntlement
as much as desire. To be sure, his devotion to personal experience
reflected the spirit of the “Me Decade,” but the growing intensity
of his sexual radicalism and conspicuous consumption increasingly

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appeared elitist. While some found it exciting and inspiring, many
working- and middle-class people facing job loss and inflation, a sex-
saturated media, a surging rate of illegitimate births, and an eroding
family structure, grew resentful of the Playboy ethic. Many ordinary
citizens looked not admiringly but askance at the country’s most noto-
rious symbol of hedonistic pursuit. Hefner, protected in his Shangri-
La cocoon, remained largely oblivious to such outside pressures. As
one of his friends quipped about him in the 1970s, “Luxury corrupts.
And absolute luxury corrupts absolutely.” The joke revealed more
than it intended. 53

As Hefner devoted himself to play with single-minded zeal
in the 1970s, moreover, problematic issues with his magazine and his
company moved to the fore. Playboy Enterprises, Inc., encountered
financial reverses while Playboy, the anchor of Hefner s professional
and personal life, was faced with redefining itself in the liberated
culture it had helped create. Hefner, preoccupied with the physical
and emotional delights of his private fantasyland, had walked away
from the direction of his enterprise. Getting it back on course proved
to be a difficult process.

PART IV

MALAISE

A Hutch Divided

A s Hefner frolicked in the sybaritic atmosphere of his Southern
California Shangri-La in the 1970s, Playboy, the backbone of
his enterprise, faced unprecedented challenges. The maga-
zine had climbed to a high point of circulation in 1972 with some
seven million monthly readers, but its readership began to slip as
a spate of imitators intruded on its territory. This brought not only
revenue losses but a crisis of identity. No longer the daring trailblazer
on the sexual frontier, the magazine struggled with a growing percep-
tion that time had passed it by. Ironically, the success of the sexual
revolution in the Swinging Seventies made Playboy appear quaint to
acolytes of sexual openness.

Moreover, to many ordinary Americans struggling daily with
economic decline during the decade, the magazine s message of unfet-
tered consumerism seemed a mocking reminder of the halcyon days
of an earlier era. Ideological polarization also whipsawed Playboy.
Progressives drawn to womens liberation and economic redistribu-
tion saw its images of naked women and conspicuous consumption
as retrograde, while conservatives viewed it as a symbol of the 1960s
threat to family values, social stability, and moral certitude.

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MR. PLAYBOY

Hefner and his associates struggled to reposition Playboy in this
new atmosphere of sexual liberation, cultural and political disarray,
and economic contraction. The task proved daunting. A central ques-
tion loomed — what would Playboy be in a post- 1960s society marked
by an economic nosedive, “Me Decade” personal preoccupations,
and a growing division between a sexually liberated, urban, bicoastal
elite and a family-oriented, religiously-inclined “Middle America” in
the heartland worried about the nation s decline? The continued suc-
cess of Hefner and his magazine depended on the answer.

At the dawn of the 1970s, Playboy occupied a lofty spot among influ-
ential American magazines, as a gathering of authors indicated. On
October 6-8, 1971, Hefner and A. C. Spectorsky hosted the Playboy
International Writers Convocation at the Playboy Towers Hotel in
Chicago. Many luminaries of American letters who had published
in the magazine attended: David Halberstam, Alan Watts, Studs
Terkel, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Arthur C. Clarke, John Kenneth
Galbraith, Harvey Cox, Art Buchwald, James Dickey, John Cheever,
Alex Haley, V. S. Pritchett, Gay Talese, Calvin Trillin, Tom Wicker,
Garry Wills, and others. In fact, so many literary aristocrats showed
up that the Atlantic termed it the “Gathering at Bunnymeade.” For
the better part of three days, these distinguished writers mingled with
Playboy editors and each other to critique the magazine, participated
in panels on subjects such as “The New Journalism,” and partook of
lavish banquets. Most of the writers seemed delighted, and occa-
sionally awestruck, to meet fellow authors whose achievements they
respected. The Writers Convocation, by gathering under one roof so
many distinguished authors, confirmed Playboys prestigious position
in the world of American letters. 1

The convocation proved to be a turning point in Playboy’s history.
Only a few months later, on January 17, 1972, Spectorsky died of a
stroke at his winter home in St. Croix, Virgin Islands. The suave New
Yorker had been in ill health for a couple of years, suffering a serious
heart attack in 1970 that kept him away from the magazine offices
for several weeks. Vague discussions had begun about a possible suc-
cessor, but the sudden demise of the man who had provided strong

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editorial leadership since the mid-1950s sent a shock of uncertainty
throughout the organization.

Several dynamic young editors — Arthur Kretchmer, Sheldon Wax,
Nat Lehrman, and Murray Fisher — had come to the magazine in the
mid-1960s and stood ready to assume leadership. Intelligent, ener-
getic, and ambitious mavericks of leftist political disposition, each had
carved out a fiefdom. In the exhilarating atmosphere of profit and
acclaim for Playboy, each pursued his own projects as publication
decisions were reached through byzantine negotiations or hammered
out in chaotic, occasionally confrontational editorial meetings. “Spec
seemed increasingly overwhelmed by a staff heady with success,”
Hefner recalled later. “I was the only one who could go into that
lions cage of creativity without a whip and a chair.” After Spectorskys
death, Hefner chose Kretchmer as Playboy s new executive editor
and appointed Wax and Lehrman as associate editors. 2

Thirty-one-year-old Arthur Kretchmer had been with the maga-
zine for five years after an education at the University of Pennsylvania
and City College of New York, a stint with Cavalier, a Playboy imita-
tor, and a short period doing freelance writing for publications such
as the Village Voice. A tall, thin New Yorker with a thick shock of long
black hair, a beard, and thick wire-rimmed glasses, he often displayed
the morose expression of a disaffected intellectual. Kretchmer saw
himself as a bohemian radical, an impression reinforced by his fond-
ness for blue jeans, boots, and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans such
as “Trotsky Youth.” The contrast with the elegant, urbane Spectorsky
could not have been more striking. “In another time and place, Spec
would have been a member of the aristocracy and Kretch a revolu-
tionary,” Hefner commented. Indeed, Kretchmer fancied himself a
counterculture radical and planned to stay at the magazine for only
a couple of years. But Spectorsky saw something in the young man —
incisive intelligence, sound judgment, tough-mindedness, an eye for
good writing — and began to groom him as his heir apparent. The two
had a falling out over Kretchmer s strong independent streak and
leftist politics, but shortly before Spectorskys death they reconciled.
Hefner believed Kretchmer was the best man for the job, and the
new executive editor quickly brought a boost of youthful energy to
the magazine. 3

The new editorial leadership at Playboy inspired confident talk
about a bright future. A few months after taking the helm, Kretchmer

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told the New York Times that “many months we think we’re publishing
the best magazine in America. Spec had to prove that Playboy
was the kind of magazine Jean-Paul Sartre gave interviews to. We
don’t have to prove anything now.” Editors joked confidently about
their preeminence, with one wisecracking that his idea of the perfect
Playboy would “feature articles by West Coast models interlaced with
the genitalia of famous writers.” Despite the confidence, however,
Playboy faced one of the biggest challenges in its history. A rival had
arisen in the men’s magazine field and launched an all-out assault on
Hefner’s publication, beginning a war that bit into the older maga-
zine’s profits and prestige. 4

The conflict had begun in the summer of 1969, when a series of
audacious ads for a new magazine, Penthouse , appeared in major urban
newspapers and advertising trade journals. The initial one pictured the
famous Playboy rabbit logo lined up in the crosshairs of a telescopic
rifle sight over the caption, “We’re going rabbit hunting.” Another pic-
tured the rabbit reading the new magazine and declared, “Penthouse
envy. Has the aging playboy gone soft?” The ad campaign reflected
the brash sensibility of Penthouse’s editor, Robert Guccione. An Italian
American from Brooklyn, Guccione had moved to Great Britain in the
late 1950s where, after dabbling with odd jobs, cartooning, and editing
for several years, he started Penthouse in 1965. It quickly amassed a
circulation of several hundred thousand, and he decided to challenge
Hefner’s position on his home turf with an American edition. 5

Penthouse shamelessly parroted Playboy in its format, offering a
fold-out “Pet of the Month,” an introductory page termed “Housecalls,”
a monthly interview, a letters-to-the-editor column called “Forum,”
and the same mix of nude features, fiction, cartoons, and articles on
food, fashion, and public affairs. Guccione shrugged off guilt, contend-
ing that “We took no more from Playboy in the end than Playboy took
from Esquire and other magazines.” More importantly, Penthouse
presented an explicit, “hot” treatment of sexuality — revealing poses,
women fondling themselves, lesbianism, fetishism, threesomes, let-
ters to the editor detailing kinky sexual adventures — that went far
beyond anything found in the older magazine. Representatives of
Penthouse contrasted this “international” sexual flavor to the fresh-
faced, all-American, cheerleader style favored by Hefner’s publica-
tion. They made a shocking argument: Playboy had fallen behind the
times in terms of sexual liberation. 6

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Guccione pushed this impression by relentlessly attacking his
more established rival as old-fashioned, even anachronistic. He
decried Playboy pictorials as “artificial” with images shaped by art
directors, hairstylists, and fashion photographers and contended that
his photos conveyed a natural, earthy, real atmosphere of sexuality.
“We give our readers the pictures without the lectures. The pinups
without the hang-ups. Writers yes, philosophizers no,” declared
his ads. He derided Hefners magazine as “uptight” and outdated in
a liberated new age. “Playboy’s reader profile gets older every year
while ours gets younger,” he proclaimed. 7

The clash between Guccione and Hefner gradually took on a nas-
tier, more personal edge. The flamboyant Penthouse editor, habitually
dressed in tight leather pants, boots, open-necked shirts, and gold rings
and medallions, sniped at the older mans style and image. “Playboy
projects the sexual identity of Hugh Hefner, which is the closest thing to
a closet queen that I know of,” he told Rolling Stone. Hefner dismissed
his outspoken rival as a self-promoter who, for all of his derisive com-
ments, aped the Hefnerian lifestyle with his New York mansion full of
beautiful women and plans for Penthouse clubs. “I don’t really object
to this energetic impersonation of his,” Hefner commented sharply. “If
I were he, I’d want to be me, too.” Hefner snubbed Guccione the only
time they met. After the publishers ran into one another at the house
of a common friend, Bemie Cornfeld, and stiffly shook hands, Hefner
invited Cornfeld to the mansion the next day to see a movie. But then
Hefner’s secretary called Cornfeld to say that Hefner preferred that
Guccione not come with him. 8

The so-called “Pubic Wars” between Playboy and Penthouse ignited
over the issue of pubic hair in nude photographs. Playboy had qui-
etly crossed this sexual frontier in an August 1969 piece showing the
Broadway dancer Paula Kelley, but Guccione did so more boldly in an
October 1970 feature on a former Miss Holland. Hefner met this new
standard of revelation in January 1971 with Playmate Liv Lindeland,
insisting that the decision had been made long before Penthouse’s
pictorial. The move raised eyebrows, and when pressed on whether
average Americans were truly ready for pubic Playmates, Hefner
grew testy. “You better ask God about that. He put it there, and it’s
time that society grew up and recognized that pubic hair exists,” he
replied. He also composed staff memos explaining the new param-
eters: “Bemember, pubic hair is no longer a taboo at Playboy — as long

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as it is handled in good taste.” In January 1972, Playboy took another
step by presenting Marilyn Cole, a statuesque brunette from Great
Britain, as the first full-frontal nude Playmate. One wag, noticing that
the magazine began selling shares on the stock exchange around the
same time, quipped that PEI “was the first company to go public and
pubic in the same year.” 9

Other than these maneuvers on the follicle front, Playboy main-
tained a public pose of haughty indifference to its upstart challenger.
But the numbers began to flash a warning. The first American issue
of Penthouse in September 1969 sold 235,000 copies. Over the next
two years sales skyrocketed, with the magazine attracting 1,280,000
readers in August 1971 and breaking the 2 million mark in mid-1972.
Playboy remained far ahead as its readership also climbed — 6.5 million
copies a month in 1971, and a high-water mark of over 7 million in
1972 — but the gap was narrowing. In the fall of 1973, Penthouse would
be up to 4 million a month, while Playboy’s sales numbers leveled off
and then began to fall. By 1976, the two magazines would be running
close, with Playboy at 5-6 million and Penthouse at 4.5-5 million. 10

As the competition intensified, Hefner realized that he must con-
front the threat more directly. In the fall of 1972 he upped the erotic
ante by launching a new magazine titled Oui, in partnership with
the French publisher Daniel Filipacchi. Envisioning a Continental
complement to Playboy that would blunt the Penthouse attack, Hefner
described the new monthly magazine as having “a European accent
in its humor, reviews, and approach to photography.” Oui started off
strongly, but never showed a profit, and it gradually became discon-
certingly clear that it was taking more readers from Playboy than
from Penthouse. After several years of mounting red ink, PEI quietly
sold Oui in 1981. 11

Further complicating matters, other rivals began challenging
Playboy’s hegemony. Throughout the early 1970s a proliferation of
skin magazines brought increased competition for attention on news-
stands. Publications such as Gallery, Touch, Voir, Genesis, Dude,
Cavalier, Viva, and Coq blatantly imitated the Hefner formula but
offered more explicit, kinkier photos. Baunchier publications such as
Screw and Hustler specialized in extremely explicit, almost gyneco-
logical images of female genitalia. This explosion of sex magazines,
Time observed, saw publications “locked in battle to zoom in on ever
more explicit poses and privacies.” When Esquire appraised the

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skin-book boom — its cover featured a perplexed Hefner surveying
an issue of Hustler — it exclaimed, “What have they done to the girl
next door?” The article concluded sardonically that in many of the
raunchy new magazines, she “comes on so strong that you’re tempted
to move to a quieter neighborhood.” 12

As the Pubic Wars became a multifront struggle in the first half
of the 1970s, Hefner found himself figh t ing a growing impression
that Playboy had become antiquated. He defended his publication as
the standard that was attacked by rivals even as they copied it. “They
say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” he noted tartly,
“so I guess I’ve been flattered more sincerely — and blatantly — than
any other magazine publisher in history.” He noted that Playboy
encompassed the entirety of the modern man’s interests while his
competitors represented a tawdry throwback to the “Victorian-pom
approach.” Some observers agreed, however, with Guccione’s decla-
ration that “Playboy has become part of the Establishment.” The Los
Angeles Times portrayed Playboy’s modesty as “going the way of the
1950s Esquire,” and Time observed that while Penthouse centerfolds
“glory in showing off their buxom bodies, moles and all, Playboys
Playmates seem unreal, plasticized, and antiseptic.” The Wall Street
Journal suggested that Hefner and his magazine had become devoted
to “striving for acceptance by the conventional world of commerce
and letters.” 13

In a sense, Playboy had become a victim of its own success. After
cracking open the door in American society that prohibited public
displays of nudity in the 1950s, the magazine had knocked it off its
hinges during the following decade. By the 1970s, a great wave of
sexual images — not only magazines but graphic movies, massage par-
lors, adult bookstores, strip clubs and “girlie shows,” and sex shops
peddling erotic paraphernalia — washed over the American landscape
and stretched the limits of popular acceptance. Indeed, the decade
witnessed the appearance of what the New York Times termed “Porno
Chic.” X-rated movies such as Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones,
and Behind the Green Door attracted vast popular audiences and
made celebrities of porn actors such as Harry Reems and Linda
Lovelace. Commercial sex districts, filled with erotic clubs and the-
aters, mushroomed in big cities throughout the country, The Joy of
Sex, a sex manual, became a huge best-seller, and sex clubs such as
Plato’s Retreat and Sandstone sprang up to meet the desires of sexual

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adventurers. While the new sexual openness tended to focus on an
urban, bicoastal audience, it spread into Middle America. As Time
observed in its 1976 cover story on “The Porno Plague,” Mason City,
Iowa (population 32,000), offered five bars featuring nude dancers.
“The concept of a loosened, public, open sexuality has become part of
mainstream American life,” noted a Newsweek columnist in 1975. 14

Indeed, Playboys own survey on sexual behavior underlined the
significant shift in American mores since the Kinsey research two
decades earlier. Titled “Sexual Behavior in the 1970s,” the study was
funded by the Playboy Foundation and published in six monthly
installments in 1973-1974. It examined the sexual attitudes and
behavior of about two thousand people in a variety of cities and towns
and reported that “we are now surrounded by evidence that people
are openly doing things that a generation ago were unthinkable, or at
least among the most guarded of personal secrets.” Investigators
found that Americans engaged in sex more frequently and increas-
ingly endorsed premarital sex, oral sex, and the end of the double
standard for men and women. Statistics revealed a marked increase in
every category of sexual practice since the Kinsey Reports. Moreover,
the Playboy survey reported that this sexual sea change had become
highly visible in the media and a major issue for the public. Data
suggested that “sexual liberalism is the emergent ideal that the great
majority of young Americans — and a fair number of older ones — are
trying to live up to,” the survey concluded. 15

For Hefner and his magazine, ironically, the triumph of the sexual
revolution created uncertainty. With sexual expression running ram-
pant, erotic images available everywhere and in every form, and the
lines of permissiveness being pushed to the point of obliteration,
Playboy’s role appeared increasingly blurry. As Hefner acknowledged
in a 1973 interview, his magazine was “not nearly as avant-garde,
or on the forefront of the fight for sexual freedom in terms of con-
tent, as it once was.” But what territory could it stake out in a new
world where there was no longer a repressive establishment to hurl
brickbats against? Seeking to avoid the raunchiness of Penthouse and
Hustler while remaining sexually relevant, Playboy struggled to steer
a course in this unfamiliar situation. 16

Initially, Hefner and his editors adopted a strategy of making
the erotic content of their magazine “hotter.” By 1974 Playboy was
displaying a variety of more explicit photographs and features and

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the Playmates began to appear in more provocative poses. Even the
magazine’s cover began to broadcast this new aesthetic. The October
1975 cover portrayed two women, both with dress straps pulled down
and one with a breast exposed, embracing warmly beside a head-
line that said, “Sappho: Stunning Portraits of Women in Love.” This
rather shocking departure into lesbian sex proved only a warm-up for
the following months issue. The November 1975 number crossed
another line with its cover photo showing a young woman in a theater
watching a film. Sprawled in her seat wearing spike-heeled shoes, she
had her blouse open and her skirt pulled up with legs spread apart.
With one hand, as Newsweek archly described it, “to give her the
benefit of the doubt, [she] seems to be plumbing the depths of her
bikini panties for a stray kernel of popcorn.” 17

This strategy misfired. Playboy’s forays into explicit shots, les-
bianism, and female masturbation triggered outrage among adver-
tisers, who deluged its offices with complaints about obscenity.
A furious Howard Lederer, director of advertising, told Hefner that
some $40 million of annual advertising revenue was in danger of dis-
appearing over the raunchier content and threatened to resign. In
an interview, Arthur Kretchmer admitted that Playboy needed to
be more careful about crossing the line “separating sensuality and
vulgarity.” Even Hefner was uncomfortable. “I wasn’t interested in
publishing pornography,” he recalled of this period in later years. “My
intent, from the outset, had been to make sex and nudity acceptable
in America.” 18

So in November 1975, Hefner ordered a strategic retreat. In a
series of meetings and memoranda, he made it clear that Playboy was
pulling back from lewd and lascivious displays. At an editorial confer-
ence held at the mansion in Los Angeles, he announced, “Gentlemen,
we have lost our compass. The magazine has lost sight of what it was
meant to be. . . . Playboy has to present the sensuality without the
coarseness. We’re going to make this a class act again.” News releases
went to outlets such as the Gallagher Report, which reported that
Hefner had decided it was “folly” to compete with newer magazines
in terms of sexual explicitness. Arthur Kretchmer was dispatched to
New York City, where he reassured nervous advertisers that Playboy
had no intention of becoming an outlet for pornography. “Hefner
doesn’t want to be known as a smut publisher,” he declared. “We’re
not fighting a crotch war at Playboy .” In December 1975, Hefner

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reassured PEI shareholders at their annual meeting that Playboy
was pulling out of the explicitness sweepstakes. The magazine also
promised newsstand wholesalers an end to nudity or explicit images
on its cover, thus ensuring that it could be presented openly and not
wrapped in brown paper or shielding. 19

So after this traumatic episode of raunchus interruptus, Playboy
reestablished its ethic of tasteful eroticism. But “taste” did not exactly
offer a blood-stirring new agenda, and Arthur Kretchmer understood
the dilemma. In 1974, he had told Hefner that Playboy needed an
overhaul and the publisher had agreed. Two years later, Kretchmer
mused about “tilting it toward a younger, brighter and hipper read-
ership” and making it once again an indispensable item for smart,
sophisticated young men. “We’re not only going to be more attuned
to the reality of living in the 70s, but we’re going to ask questions and
challenge premises as well,” he promised. But revamping Playboy for
a new age, it soon became evident, was easier said than done. 20

After abandoning “this gynecological, who-can-be-more-explicit race”
among men’s magazines, as Hefner put it, Playboy groped for fresh
identity throughout the latter 1970s. But the process of evolution was a
subtle one. In fact, readers of the magazine encountered a comforting
array of familiar features as articles explored stylish clothes, fast cars,
domestic amenities, and popular pastimes. Newfangled technology
such as “videocassettes” came in for attention, as did the hottest new
pinball and video games. Entertainment trends and sports attracted
the usual attention, ranging from Norman Mailer’s two-part article
on the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman “rope a dope” fight in Zaire
to a fascinating piece on Francis Ford Coppola, Hollywood’s trendiest
young film director. Two other traditions, “Playboy’s Annual Jazz and
Pop Poll” and “Playboy’s Annual Football Picks” also remained firmly
embedded in the magazine’s format. 21

Playboy kept up its tradition of distinguished writing. Old friends
such as John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, and Kurt Vonnegut contrib-
uted pieces as did a galaxy of new contributors that included Doris
Fessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Michael Crichton, N adine Gordimer,
Susan Sontag, Farry McMurtry, Mario Puzo, and Gunter Grass.

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In October 1976, Playboy ran a preview excerpt of Alex Haleys
new book, Roots, edited by the magazine’s Murray Fisher, which
went on to become a huge best-seller and popular television mini-
series. Reviews of current books, records, and movies continued, as
did the Playboy Forum with its discussion of a wide array of social
issues. The Playboy Interview presented scintillating discussions
with figures ranging from Marlon Brando to Germaine Greer, Jack
Nicholson to Joan Baez, Norman Lear to Anita Bryant, Albert Speer
to Erica Jong.

Sex, of course, stayed front and center stage in Playboy through-
out the 1970s. The Playmate of the Month remained the primary
erotic attraction, although with a few minor alterations. Hefner fur-
ther personalized Playmates by adding their signature to the center-
folds in 1975, and by introducing two years later the Playmate Data
Sheet with its vital statistics, ambitions, and “turn-ons” and “turnoffs.”
Traditional celebrity pictorials included old favorites such as Elke
Sommer and Raquel Welch as well as rising young starlets such as
Valerie Perrine, Melanie Griffith, and Barbara Bach. Readers also
encountered the customary photographic surveys of beautiful coeds
from around the country, such as “The Girls of the Pac 10” or “The
Girls of the Ivy League.”

But a new explicitness marked these erotic presentations. While
Playboy’s cover was toned down and photographs never tilted
the raunch meter like Penthouse and Hustler, its sexual ethic became
more daring and explicit than ever before. Playmate photographs
were increasingly revealing, with full-frontal nudity a standard fea-
ture and spread-legged poses more common. An uninhibited sexual
aesthetic also influenced the “Playboy Advisor,” which increasingly
described intense or unusual sexual experiences, often with graphic
details, and discussed sexual techniques such as oral sex and the use
of sex toys. By 1977, Playboy was examining X-rated movies as part of
its film reviews. Articles ranged further afield as in 1976 s “Me and the
Other Girls,” by Kathy Lowry, which offered a confessional account
of experimentation with bisexuality. The following year saw both Dan
Greenburgs “My Weekend of Flashy Orgasms,” which detailed his
stay at Sandstone, the notorious California retreat specializing in mul-
tipartner sex, and “Swingers Scrapbook,” a text and photo feature on
the sexual frontier of orgies, threesomes, and every variety of fantasy
fulfillment. In 1978, the magazine presented “The Great Playboy

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MR. PLAYBOY

Sex-Aids Road Test.” This consumer survey, which certainly would
have made Ralph Nader blush, recruited three couples to test the
reliability and performance of vibrators, dildos, massagers, stimula-
tors, and other kinds of sexual paraphernalia. 22

Despite the intensified eroticism and popular, time-tested fea-
tures, Playboy’s standard formula appeared stale to some observers, a
middle-aged rendering of what seemed to be hip rather than the real
thing. Arthur Kretchmer believed that the problem stemmed from
post- 1960s malaise. Following the social turmoil and political crusad-
ing of the Aquarian Age, he observed later, “Playboy was as aimless
for a while as I think the culture was. . . . Society cooled off and, to
be frank, we cooled off.” 23

Hefner grew aware of these difficulties. “I think Playboy is a very
good book, but it has lost some of its vigor,” he confessed to the
Village Voice in 1975. When pressed on whether time had passed
Playboy by, he admitted that “after twenty-two years, the magazine
had become repetitive.” Rut revisions were coming, the publisher
promised, as he and his editorial staff were “exploring and examin-
ing the editorial product, and making some changes to revitalize the
book, make it more contemporary, make it more part of today.” 24

Indeed, the mid-1970s saw Hefner and his lieutenants laboring to
revitalize the venerable publication. They kept intact Playboy’s basic
formula of sex and consumerism, but experimented with features that
would distinguish it from its competitors. As Kretchmer described it,
the magazine sought to define and embody “the cutting edge of the
mainstream.” 25

One editorial project sought to integrate Playboy’s sexual themes
into a broader emphasis on the modem male lifestyle. ‘We are going to
re-emphasize what the magazine is first and foremost: a lifestyle book
in which sex is one part of a total package,” Hefner announced. Or in
Kretchmer s pithy phrase, Playboy intended to be “the indispensable
magazine to the urban male reader whose psyche is 28 years old.” 26

In part, this attempt to “relate to contemporary lifestyles,” as
Hefner described it, involved a trendier tone. It also involved modi-
fications to the format, as two new lifestyle sections appeared in 1977.
“Playboy’s Pipeline” consisted of short pieces on contemporary trends
that promised “tips on keeping your lifestyle in high gear,” while
“Playboy on the Scene” pledged to cover “what’s happening, where it’s
happening, and who’s making it happen.” In the April 1978 issue, for

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example, they examined a variety of topics: importing foreign cars,
surviving tax audits, rehabbing historic houses, the newest micro-
wave oven technology, and European influences on mens fashion. In
Hefner s words, these modifications “reemphasized what the book is
first and foremost: a lifestyle magazine devoted to how one spends
ones leisure time.” 27

Playboy’s reinvigorated lifestyle orientation inspired a new pro-
motional campaign. With great fanfare, the magazine began running
a series of ads in 1977 titled “The Playboy Reader: His Lust Is for
Life.” They presented Playboy as representative of a cohort of pros-
perous, under-thirty-five young men who had rebelled in the 1960s
but now sought to work within the system. “Good news for American
business: those young men who wouldn’t sell out in 1967 are buying-in
in 1977,” said one ad. The campaign depicted a cadre of sensitive,
educated, upscale Baby Boomers as “new materialists” who thought-
fully consumed items that promised to create a richer, emotionally
satisfying life. “These life -embracing young adults have kept the best
of the 60s, leavened it with their own maturity and invented a whole
new thing for the 70s,” touted another ad. “L aded jeans. Now pre-faded
and with a designer name at $40 a pair. Leather boots. Soft leather boots.”
Photos reinforced the text, showing Playboy subscribers jogging in
fancy running suits, scuba diving, sitting down to a gourmet meal,
and snuggling with their “lady” to watch the sunset at their summer
house. After being eclipsed by the social agitation of the 1960s, the
good life reappeared at the center of the Playboy lifestyle in the “Lust
for Life” campaign. 28

Playboy also recast itself as a venue for investigative journalism
in the mid-1970s. Operating in a cynical atmosphere shaped by the
Vietnam debacle and the Watergate scandal, the magazine increas-
ingly labored to expose public life as a sordid mass of corruption,
ignorance, and greed. In 1974, Playboy set the trend with its seri-
alization of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodwards All the Presidents
Men, the blockbuster expose of the Nixon administrations crimes
and demise. In subsequent years, articles examined “Big Brother”
surveillance of citizens by the federal government, incompetence
and financial fraud in the American health-care system, pervasive
safety violations in the airline industry, the looming bankruptcy of
the Social Security system, and rampant corruption in modem labor
unions. A particularly shocking article appeared in 1976, when

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“The Puppet and the Puppetmasters: Uncovering the Secret World
of Nixon, Hughes, and the CIA” accused Howard Hughes of using
his multibillion-dollar empire to manipulate President Richard Nixon
and the CIA into illegal, covert intelligence operations that resulted
in Watergate. 29

Playboys new emphasis on nonfiction included healthy doses of
the “New Journalism.” By the late 1960s and early 1970s, journalists
such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Gay
Talese were reformulating traditional practice by replacing “objec-
tive” reporting, “balanced” analysis, and narrative description with
abundant dialogue, dramatic scenes, and the authors participation in
the story. Playboy embraced this flashy, dramatic, highly personalized
style, describing it as “a writer telling a story that he or she has lived
with little pretense of objectivity.” It offered Richard Rhodes’s per-
sonal account of the destruction of the Mississippi River by economic
developers and his exploration of the modem cocaine culture, which
featured him buying and using the drug, contacting sellers and dis-
tributors, and carefully avoiding the police. Dan Greenburg’s “My
First Orgy” humorously related his own fumbling participation in
several group-sex parties. Playboy even ran “The Great Shark Hunt,”
the story of a drug-soaked deep-sea fishing tournament in Cozumel
by one of the genre’s founders, Hunter S. Thompson. 30

Playboy directly engaged with political issues as never before.
Throughout the 1970s, the magazine consistently appeared as a left-
ist gadfly, although growing into the role had been painful. A. C.
Spectorsky had clashed with his younger, more radical assistant edi-
tors over the political drift of the magazine in the late 1960s, describ-
ing their dissenting articles as just “do-good indignation.” He furiously
objected to a draft article on environmentalism condemning vaca-
tion resorts, noting that it began “with a putdown of Tahoe, a resort
that we are covering favorably in our upcoming travel feature for
March.” Hefner often agreed, writing one memo that urged the edi-
tors to avoid “thinking of ourselves, and of our readers, as a bunch
of young hippie activists. They’re not — and we shouldn’t attempt to
be.” In the spring of 1970, amid a long, favorable report on the state
of Playboy and its immediate future, Spectorsky issued a warning. “It
would be very easy — and very dangerous — to revolutionize playboy,
to make it the voice of the growing edge of anti-establishment youth,”
he wrote. 31

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With Spectorsky’s death, the rift over politicizing Playboy ended
as the magazine became an unabashed advocate of leftist political
positions. In 1971, it announced a three-part symposium on “A New
Set of National Priorities” that claimed, “The decay of our cities, the
deterioration of the environment, and the enduring poverty suffered
by 15 percent of the population are the three major challenges the
U.S. must meet when it divests itself of the burdens of Vietnam.”
The experts mustered to discuss these crises were a who’s who of
liberal spokesmen, including Senator Gaylord Nelson, Mayor Carl
B. Stokes, and the writer Michael Harrington. 32

Playboy elaborated its leftist critique of American social and politi-
cal ills throughout the 1970s. It derided the evangelist Billy Graham
for promoting “the unswerving belief that God, the flag, and the
president are an immutable trinity.” It showcased liberal senator
Philip Hart’s denunciation of modern corporate crime, presented
E. L. Doctorow’s jeremiad on American nuclear weaponry, and fea-
tured a long, sympathetic Playboy Interview with radical icons Tom
Hayden and Jane Fonda. Other articles analyzed Nelson Rockefeller
as “the true Godfather of American politics” and described Nixon’s
appointees to the Supreme Court as architects of “police-state ver-
dicts” and governmental tyranny. In 1977, “The Playboy Enemies
List” spoofed the infamous file kept by the Nixon administration by
amassing its own register of conservative villains, including Phyllis
Schlafly, Charles H. Keating Jr., George Gilder, and Frank Rizzo. 33

At the same time, Playboy’s politics, while firmly leftist, displayed a
streak of cynicism. The whole system was corrupt, the magazine often
seemed to suggest. In 1972, a skeptical article observed that supporters
of the presidential campaign of George McGovern “consistently con-
fused their elitist youth constituency — college students — with youth
itself. There were damn few gas-station attendants on the floor of
the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach.” Pieces skew-
ered insurgent icons from the 1960s such as Rennie Davis, a radical
leader who had become the chief proselytizer for an Indian religious
guru, and Timothy Leary, who betrayed many of his old friends to
the federal government in the 1970s. The magazine went after Jane
Fonda, observing that her multimillion-dollar Hollywood career often
seemed at odds with her outspoken political radicalism 34

Playboy’s political engagement produced one of the biggest jour-
nalistic coups of the decade: the notorious Playboy Interview with

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Jimmy Carter in the fall of 1976 that created a political firestorm
on the eve of the presidential election. Throughout the summer,
Robert Scheer had interviewed Carter several times on assignment
for Playboy. In the final session at Carters home in Plains, Georgia,
the candidate was asked about the fear among some voters that his
Baptist piety and moralism might unduly influence his political judg-
ment. Carter replied with a long soliloquy about his religious convic-
tions. Christianity taught that everyone was a sinner, he said, and
it was Gods place to judge sin. The righteous Christian should not
haughtily condemn the person who “leaves his wife and shacks up
with somebody out of wedlock,” nor should you “consider yourself
better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch
of women while the other is loyal to his wife.” He confessed, “Tve
looked on a lot of women with lust. IVe committed adultery in my
heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do —
and I have done it — and God forgives me for it.” 35

Carters comments caused a national uproar. “The Great Playboy
Furor,” as Newsweek described it, saw “newspapers throughout the
country making whoopee with Carters over-candid confessions.”
Traditionalists and religious conservatives denounced him for hypoc-
risy, pointing to his willingness to talk to a girlie magazine while claim-
ing that his Christian character was the basis of his campaign. They
condemned his use of salty language — “screw” and “shack up,” in
particular — as degrading and unworthy of a national leader. While
some ministers defended Carter for his “judge not lest ye be judged”
position, many more attacked him for undermining the need for
moral judgment. In the indignant, if linguistically challenged, retort
of one, “It is not holier-than-thou to condemn another man for shack-
ing down [sic] with another mans wife.” Even some Democrats and
liberal supporters questioned the lack of judgment and unseemliness
that colored this episode. Max Lerner, an old friend of Hefner and
Playboy, chastised the candidate for using “locker-room language”
and misjudging presidential standards of decorum. 36

Carters interview delighted cartoonists. One depicted a Playboy
Bunny sitting on the lap of the leering candidate as he said, “I’m
Jimmy Carter. I’m running for President.” Another showed a tooth-
some Carter staring at the Statue of Liberty, while in a balloon above
his head appeared an image of Lady Liberty in the nude. In a takeoff

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on the Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey , a cartoon depicted Carter
standing next to a giant rendering of the Playboy rabbit logo as the
candidate asked innocently, “Rabbit? . . . What rabbit? I don’t see any
rabbit.” His opponent, President Gerald R. Ford also took advantage
of the Georgian’s Playboy problem. Ry mid-October, some 350 news-
papers in twenty-two states were running an ad that juxtaposed Ford’s
recent appearance on the cover of Newsweek with the Carter inter-
view on the cover of Playboy next to Playmate Patti McGuire, who
was seductively unbuttoning her shirt. The caption said, “One good
way to decide this election.” Ry late October, Carter ruefully admit-
ted to the press, “I would not give that interview if I had to do it over
again,” but he held on to narrowly win the election. 37

Playboy’s vigorous investigative and political journalism in the
1970s sat alongside a softer editorial theme: romance. Hefner urged
his editors to make it the new touchstone of the magazine, declaring,
‘When there is romance, the sex connection is difficult to attack.
Romance is both traditional and contemporary. Romance is blue col-
lar and white collar. We have always been more romantic and there-
fore more corny, than our contemporary magazines. ... If the public
could be made to see our concept of ourselves, any image problems
that we’ve been having would be over.” Kretchmer urged the staff to
infuse romance into fashion pieces, service features, travel articles,
even the “Playboy Advisor,” which should increase its focus on letters
involving romantic situations and problems. 38

This theme brought a new flavor to the magazine. A feature
titled “The Rousing Return of Romance” announced, “The signs are
everywhere. Men and women are wearing softer colors and dressing
up. On the beaches, couples walk hand in hand. In sidewalk cafes,
they sip Perrier or white wine. Candlelight is replacing electricity in
some restaurants.” It guided readers through the romantic features
of cities such as San Francisco and New Orleans, offered tips for
choosing romantic gifts, gave pointers on the art of romantic conver-
sation, and suggested romantic products such as massage oils, silk
pajamas, and fluted champagne glasses. Playboy began running a
regular column titled “Man and Woman” that focused on romantic
issues. In its twenty-fifth anniversary issue in January 1979, a cartoon
even departed from the usual sex-and-frolic themes. It pictured a
middle-aged man reading Playboy in bed while his wife stood naked

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before the mirror as she prepared to put on a negligee. He looked up
and said affectionately, “You know something, sweetheart? Playboy
isn’t the only thing that’s still great after twenty-five years.” 39

Perhaps most tellingly, however, Hefner and his editors reshaped
Playboy to capture the “Me Decade” Zeitgeist of the 1970s. The
magazine, with its long-standing agenda of sexual and consumerist
satisfactions, saw the “Let’s talk about Me — let’s find the real Me”
as a reemergence of its natural constituency. The present generation
“is closer to what Playboy is all about and has been talking about
for 25 years than at any time since we’ve been publishing,” Hefner
explained. “It’s interesting that we live in what has been called a me
generation . . . [with] an appropriate appreciation of living one’s own
life and getting the most out of it.” 40

Playboys “Lust for Life” promotional campaign in 1977 epito-
mized the new sensibility. An early ad in the series described a typical
subscriber as “very much focused into today and what he can do for
himself. . . . Expressing himself to the world. Without denying him-
self the world.” Another quoted a subscriber who said, “My reaction
to things now is how do I feel, not so much how the world feels.”
Another described the value system of the typical modem Playboy
reader. “First, it’s a lifestyle of fierce loyalty. To himself. And to any
product that helps him to be himself,” it reported. 41

A host of Playboy articles fanned out to explore the personal ter-
rain of the “Me Generation.” “Leisure in the Seventies” concluded
that any potential pitfalls involved with the growth of nonwork time
“are outweighed by the promise of self-exploration and discovery — it
affords anyone with the energy and imagination to fill — rather than
kill — his free time.” In 1971, Playboy’s “Student Survey” concluded
that college youth were “turning away from social concerns toward
more personal pursuits.” In 1974, “I’m OK, You’re So-So,” by editor
G. Barry Golson, parodied self-awareness programs and popular psy-
chotherapies as guides for “how to achieve self-fulfillment through
mental discipline, positive thinking, and a firm belief in other people’s
mediocrity.” Other pieces described the new physical fitness craze as
enhancing “your ability to use your body to live life as you want to,”
and the “inner game of sex” as a Zen strategy shifting emphasis “from
outward success to inner growth.” 42

The Playmates, always a mirror of social values, reflected the turn
toward introspection. “The greatest luxury in my life is solitude,”

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avowed Linda Beatty, Miss August 1976. “The days I have to myself
I spend on myself: reading, exercising, and meditating. . . . Working
out our differences [with men I date] teaches me about myself.”
Pamela Jean Bryant, Miss April 1978, described herself as a dreamer
and a loner. “I spend hours at the beach or chain myself to my desk,
just writing in my journal. . . . I’ve stopped listening to others and
started listening to myself.” 43

Perhaps the ultimate expression of the magazine’s “Me Decade”
orientation, however, came in “The Playboy Beport on American
Men.” At mid-decade, Hefner commissioned Louis Harris and
Associates to conduct a survey of American men to discover their
values and attitudes. Over a five-week period in late 1976 and early
1977, researchers questioned 1,990 men between the ages of eigh-
teen and forty-nine to discover their views on family, love, drug
use, work, leisure, religion, money, health, friends, peace of mind,
changes in womens roles, and politics. When released to the public
in 1979, the report concluded that American men could be divided
into four groups along a continuum: “Traditionalists,” who defended
time-honored values of the past; “Conventionalists,” who were pre-
pared to consider new alternatives after they had gained acceptance;
“Contemporaries,” who preferred fresh values as part of a continuity
with the established order; and “Innovators,” who embraced change
and a willingness to experiment with alternative lifestyles. 44

But cutting across these categories, the “Playboy Beport” claimed,
was a powerful endorsement of personal self-fulfillment. “The
increased emphasis men are placing on self-fulfillment, pleasure, and
doing one’s own thing is dramatically altering America’s traditional
value system,” it concluded. “The emerging self-oriented values
represent a new personal liberalism. It stands apart from the tradi-
tional, conservative-radical distinctions based on social and economic
issues. Its concern is for the conduct of one’s personal life.” A project
spokesman explained that this was not mere selfishness or greed, but
a demand for “personal relevance,” a “quest for self-realization.” The
use of money, work, and leisure to find private meaning was “very
much what this ‘me generation’ is.” This was music to Playboy s ears.
It was “now perfectly acceptable to say, out loud, what I care about is
myself,” a spokesperson for the magazine noted when the report was
released. The drive for self-enrichment was “inherent in the original
concept in the magazine and the life that Hefner’s been living.” 45

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MR. PLAYBOY

The adjustments to Playboy made by Hefner and his editors in
the mid-1970s stabilized its identity after the drift of the Pubic Wars
period. But journalistic success, of course, depends on profits as
well as product. The larger financial picture of Playboy Enterprises,
Inc., grew hazy in the 1970s as the magazines readership slid and
most company endeavors lost money, causing concern about the
future among investors and in the business community. These
nagging monetary problems made it clear that the future of Hefner s
enterprise demanded financial reforms as well as editorial rethink-
ing. The result was one of the biggest shake-ups in the history of the
company.

Ill

In early 1976, Playboy Enterprises, Inc., quietly removed the “Playboy”
moniker from two of its largest facilities. Its New Jersey resort west
of New York City became the “Great Gorge Resort Hotel,” while its
hotel in downtown Chicago transformed into “The Towers.” “What
we did,” said a company vice president, “was admit that the Playboy
name and rabbit-head emblem were a detriment to business. That’s
quite an admission for an outfit that a few years ago was sure it was
going to conquer the world.” 46

The change revealed much. By the mid-1970s, Hefners company
was facing a financial crisis as Playboy and the London casinos con-
tinued turning a profit while its other far-flung endeavors — clubs,
hotels and resorts, films, records, and books — were losing prodigious
amounts of money. Pretax profits of some $20 million in 1973 had
sunk to $2 million in 1975 and rose only slightly to $5 million in 1976.
In an interview with Advertising Age, Hefner blamed part of the
problem on a weak economy but also admitted that his company had
been “growing without really getting on top of the individual areas,
departments, and divisions.” Many company insiders were more
cynical, joking darkly that PEI leaders “pushed a wheelbarrow full of
money down to the basement every night and burned it.” 47

In the summer of 1975, Hefner initiated a draconian measure.
He brought in Victor Lownes, his old sidekick, who had left Chicago
in the early 1960s to run the profitable Playboy casino operation in
England. Lownes became head of Playboy Clubs International, the

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biggest money drain in the company, with instructions to reform the
operation. Lownes, who quickly became known as “Jaws,” brought
his inimitable flair and notorious mean streak to the Windy City. He
announced his plans for “getting rid of the potted plants and all the
people hiding behind them,” joking that he might move operations
back to the old headquarters on Ohio Street and hold a footrace
where “anyone who can get down there and claim a desk we’d keep.
Everyone else would be out.” Within a few weeks he brutally fired
dozens of people. But Lownes went too far when he announced that
“Hefners personal image is not that useful of a promotional vehicle
anymore,” and the publisher reined him in. “I’ve got egg on my face
and I guess I was moving faster and farther than Hef wanted me to,”
said a chastened Lownes. But the damage had been done — company
morale lay shattered. 48

In 1976, the Wall Street Journal offered a bleak assessment of
Hefner’s empire: a drop in circulation and advertising with the maga-
zine, a flood of red ink with hotels and resorts and domestic Playboy
Clubs, the record and film divisions losing money, the Lirst National
Bank of Chicago withdrawing two lines of credit totaling $6.5 mil-
lion because of the drug scandal, a hostile IBS leveling a $7.7 million
bill for back taxes, PEI stock bottoming out at a price of $4 a share.
Ironically, the article contended, many problems stemmed from the
perception that the sexual revolution had passed Playboy by. “Nobody
gets that excited about looking at a Bunny anymore,” it noted. But
difficulties also came from the company’s “reputation for poor man-
agement” and its disdain for business expertise. Overall, the Journal
concluded, it was clear that “Playboy’s days of booming growth have
ended.” 49

Hefner had grown painfully aware of looming problems. Usually
bored by business details, he listened closely to his 1975 task force
and its recommendations for corporate reorganization. While initially
resisting proposals to fire people and jettison company projects, he
gradually grasped the magnitude of the economic difficulties fac-
ing PEI. After a hard-nosed appraisal, Hefner committed himself to
organizational restructuring, no matter how difficult. 50

He moved dramatically in the spring of 1976. Hefner announced
that he was stepping aside as president and chief operating officer of
PEI and had launched a search for a replacement who would focus
on the day-to-day operation of the company. He would remain as

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MR. PLAYBOY

chairman and chief executive in charge of major policy decisions.
Hefner had finally come to terms with not only his own limited
business acumen but that of the friends he had entrusted to run his
company. Respect and communication between the founder and
his lieutenants had broken down. “One of the things that bothered
me the most was their attitude toward Hefner,” said one task force
member. “I saw everything from contempt to just total disregard to
casual dismissal. ... I think they were perceiving an ineffective leader
and that was an accurate perception. He was, at that time, an inef-
fective leader.” 51

By the summer, Hefner found his man in Derick Daniels, a forty-
seven-year-old vice president of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain.
The son of a patrician North Carolina family, he had grown up in
Washington, D.C., and attended the University of North Carolina
before going into journalism. Daniels worked for the Durham
Morning Herald, St. Petersburg Times, Atlanta Constitution, and
Miami Herald and got his big break in 1967 when he became city
editor of the Detroit Free Press, just in time to direct the paper to
a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the devastating race riots of that
year. In 1974, he became a vice president and chief of news opera-
tions for Knight Ridder, Inc., with its chain of thirty-two newspapers
nationwide. 52

When an executive recruiter first approached him, Daniels
recoiled. “I told the headhunter, ‘No, no, no,’ that I really didn’t want
to talk about it,” he admitted to Business Week. But curiosity got the
best of him, and when he met Hefner they clicked immediately. After
five or six hours talking together, Daniels was struck by the publisher’s
intelligence and honesty. “He was a guy who knew what he wanted,
he knew what the problems of the company were, and knew some-
thing had to be done with it, and he was ready to do it,” Daniels
recalled later. He became convinced that Hefner genuinely wanted
an infusion of managerial expertise. In his words, “He wasn’t going to
be looking over your shoulder every moment — [he was] a man who
had recognized that he had built something that had outgrown his
own interest in continuing to try to run day to day.” 53

So Daniels accepted the position and joined the company on
October 1, 1976. He took the helm with characteristic confidence
and disarming wit. He told the press that Hefner “made it clear to
me that he understands the need for a professional manager with an

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entrepreneurial flair. He wants that place run and I intend to run it.”
Revealing his plans to move into a Chicago penthouse apartment near
PEI headquarters, he quipped, “Eve done my duty to the suburbs,
back lawns, home repairs.” When asked if his own sexual education
had prepared him to enter the notorious Playboy scene, he joked,
“Like everyone else my age, I learned about the female anatomy from
the Sears catalogue .” 54

In terms of style and appearance befitting a Playboy president,
Daniels appeared right out of central casting. Slightly built, urbane,
and impeccably tailored, he had an unusual pair of mismatched
eyes — one blue and one hazel — topped by stylishly barbered locks
that spilled down over his ears and collar. His tanned and deeply lined
face — a friend once compared it to the facade of a North Carolina
beach house — wore an intense, brooding, occasionally bemused
expression. A four-packs-a-day smoker, he deployed the constant
Benson & Hedges cigarette in his hand as a prop to accent words or
phrases uttered in a smoky drawl. Somewhat reserved in social and
professional situations, he cultivated stylized mannerisms that rein-
forced an impression of incisive intelligence, idiosyncratic style, and
understated toughness. “First impression is John Wayne trapped in
Joel Greys body,” noted a reporter upon meeting him . 55

Daniels emerged quickly as an articulate spokesman for Playboy.
He painted a bright future, describing it as “a magazine that cel-
ebrates life” and a purveyor of dreams. “I see the need for fantasy
in a complicated, difficult world,” he said. “If you don’t dream about
things that can be, what hope is there?” He linked Playboy to “the
upscale reader — the upwardly mobile man, open to new ideas and
experiences” who had “a feeling for quality” both in life and in his
consumer preferences . 56

But Daniels got off to a controversial start. A few months after
starting his new job, he held a belated farewell party in Miami that
sent jaws dropping throughout the Playboy organization. Held at the
spacious home of a sculptor friend in Coconut Grove, the gather-
ing featured male butlers and bartenders dressed in leather-and-
leopardskin outfits with bare buttocks. Female attendants wore black
thong panties and no tops. In the middle of the festivities, a shapely
young woman performed a striptease to reveal her pubic hair shaved
in the shape of a heart. Moreover, Daniels appeared on the cover of
the Miami Magazine reclining against his twenty-two-year-old female

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MR. PLAYBOY

companion and dressed in his garb for the evening: a gold lame jumpsuit
unzipped to the waist and gold neck chain and medallion. When Lee
Gotdieb, PEIs public relations director, saw the story and cover photo,
he scrambled down the hall to ask Daniels to suppress any more public-
ity. While the company was striving to create an image of seriousness
and fiscal responsibility, he complained, this story appeared showing
“the new president in this bizarre get-up at some kind of orgy.” As
Hefner recalled later, “If I was afraid of hiring someone who was too
stuffy, I didn’t have anything to worry about with Derick .” 57

As Daniels took up the presidency of PEI, his personal style did
little to reassure nervous investors and executives. He married the
young woman on the magazine cover, M. J. Taylor, the day before
assuming the presidency. A tall, self-confident, articulate young woman
with a full figure often on display with see-through blouses, she was
a free spirit who once attended a corporate reception barefoot. The
Danielses quickly acquired a reputation in Chicago for outlandish par-
ties in their Towers penthouse apartment that spawned rumors of
sexual “swinging.” The new presidents personal eccentricities — daily
consumption of up to thirty cups of coffee, fasting for two days every
week — added to his mystique, as did his flamboyant wardrobe. He
would appear at the office in an elegant blue pinstriped suit, or a white
suit with matching white shoes, or leather pants with sweater and scarf
and loafers with no socks, or a flying suit with red cowboy boots. At
a welcoming party held in the Playboy Mansion, he wore a billowing
white blouse, tight white trousers, and white high-heeled boots, with
a white silk scarf draped around his neck. As Daniels told one of his

new colleagues, at Knight Ridder he had been “a closet freak Now

I work in a corporation where I can be what I want to be .” 58

Many company executives found this unseemly for a corporate
president. One feared that Daniels was “absolutely, personally out
of control, and that we had hired a nut.” Victor Lownes was particu-
larly contemptuous. “Go up to your room and have a party, Derick,
and don’t bother me with this nonsense,” he was overheard reply-
ing to a Daniels directive. In fact, as rumors spread about the social
antics of the new president and his wife, Lownes coined a moniker
for the couple that soon spread throughout the Playboy organization:
“The Bizarros .” 59

But Hefner and Daniels mutually supported one another. Publicly,
Hefner lauded his new lieutenant’s business and administrative skills,

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while Daniels praised the publisher at every opportunity. Much of
America had repressed sexual impulses, he told the New York Times ,
until “Hugh Hefner taught his readers that it was healthy to be a
human sexual creature.” To the Chicago Tribune, he described the
publisher as “the classic entrepreneur” and “the single most impor-
tant promotional entity that Playboy has.” 60

Daniels, with Hefners support, used his first six months as presi-
dent to formulate a basic strategy for saving PEI: focus on strengths
and get rid of liabilities. The company had started with a strong
core — the magazine and the clubs — but then caught a bad case of
“conglomerate fever,” expanding into “hotels and resorts and movie
theatres and record companies . . . with very little knowledge of the
businesses they were getting into,” he observed. Daniels’s plan was
simple: “to trim off some of the things that were not working and . . .
build the core strength of the whole company.” 61

In the spring of 1977 Daniels amputated several unprofitable
PEI enterprises, closing the Playboy resort hotel in Jamaica and the
Baltimore Playboy Club. He soon sold off theaters in New York and
Chicago, franchised several new Playboy Clubs, suspended motion
picture production, and reached a partnership agreement with
Columbia Records regarding the company’s ailing record division.
“We are organizing, planning, training, head-hunting and, especially,
professionalizing our approach to multiple businesses,” Daniels told
the press. In a widely publicized “hutch cleaning” in September 1977,
he terminated some seventy PEI employees from the bloated payroll.
These cutbacks were necessary, Daniels stated, because “over the
years a sizable number of functions and jobs grew up which did not
contribute directly to the profitability of the company.” 62

Nearly everyone, both inside the company and out, agreed that
such reforms were overdue. Wi t hin a short time, the cutbacks had
stopped the financial slide of Hefner’s enterprise as fiscal years 1977
and 1978 showed a modest rebound in profits and the price of PEI
stock rose. Financial analysts responded, with Forbes headlining “The
Bunny Battles Back” and the New York Times judging that “Playboy
Settles Down to Work: Glamour Gone, Profits Revive.” The com-
pany, most observers agreed, had righted itself but was not totally out
of the woods. “The bunny is back, no denying that,” said one analyst.
“But it’s not clear whether it’s merely shot up with a lot of cortisone
or has truly regained its health.” 63

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MR. PLAYBOY

Thus Hugh Hefner and Derick Daniels were able to stabilize PEI’s
financial condition. But as the 1970s ended, Playboy occupied a more
uncertain position than it had at the beginning of the decade. In
an increasingly polarized America, some critics on both the left and
right took aim at the Hefner agenda. During the twenty-fifth anniver-
sary celebration in 1978-1979, Mike Royko, the cranky populist and
longtime columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times , scathingly described
the publisher as a self-promoter whose idea of sophistication was
to “jiggle pinball machines in his rec room, drink a case of Pepsi a
day, and play backgammon with those of his companions intelligent
enough to understand the game.” The liberal commentator Richard
Cohen dismissed Hefner as a man desperately trying to concoct his
own legend out of the need “we all have to justify our lives, to give
it meaning — to say that it has been more than just pleasures and
luxuries.” The radical Guardian denounced Playboy for promoting
“consumerism run amok.” 64

On the right, critics excoriated Playboy’s “leering, voyeurs view of
sex from the mens room wall” and its “obsession for materialism and
personal pleasure. It is shallow and greedy.” Colorful denunciations
of Hefner and his magazine piled up: “embarrassingly hedonistic,”
“an overdose of ostentatious materialism,” “flesh-peddling spiffed up
with name brand contributors,” “sexual junk.” Perhaps the unkind-
est cut came from the town newspaper where Hefner had gone to
college, which concluded that “ Playboy , which has gone from bad
to worse in portrayal of the female anatomy and in usage of language
of the gutter, has done little but degrade the society in which it has
prospered over this fourth of a century.” 65

But much worse was to come. As a new decade opened, a con-
servative political and cultural revolution that had slowly gathered
momentum throughout the 1970s took the United States by storm.
Opposed to nearly everything that Playboy represented, it drove
Hefner and his enterprise into a desperate defensive posture. Within
a short time, what had been merely disconcerting became horren-
dous as Mr. Playboy entered a long, nightmarish era in his life.

The Dark Decade

O n August 15, 1980, Hefner and a group of his friends were
playing in the mansion gamehouse when a curious phone call
arrived. When the publishers appointments secretary, Cis
Rundle, picked up, the caller identified himself and asked to speak
to Hefner. Cis told the publisher, who, annoyed at being interrupted,
said she should take a message. The caller replied, “Well, he better
come to the phone. He’s got a dead Playmate on his hands,” and men-
tioned the Playmate’s name. Rundle gasped. The victim was Dorothy
Stratten, the recently crowned Playmate of the Year, a transcendently
beautiful, innocent young woman who had won the heart of everyone
in the Playboy organization since arriving in Los Angeles from rural
Canada only two years before. 1

Rundle rushed to Hefners side and blurted out the news. In her
words, “Hef turned slate grey. I first thought he might faint, but he
didn’t. He was just in shock. He went right to the phone and spoke
for a bit. Everyone was just standing there frozen.” The detective
reported that the young woman had died from a shotgun blast to the
face, and the body of her estranged husband also lay at the scene,

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MR. PLAYBOY

apparently having killed himself after shooting his wife. Hefner was
stunned. Another aide, who had rushed in, reported that “Hef
was standing there and looked sort of like a stone. He was ashen. His
face was all white. ... I put my hand on his arm and it was like his skin
was moving.” As the reality of the terrible event sank in, Hefner gath-
ered himself and began orchestrating calls to the victim’s friends and
family as well as to key figures in the magazine. Disbelief mingled
with horror and grief at the news. 2

While a tragedy in its own right, of course, Dorothy Strattens
tragic death symbolically marked the beginning of nearly a decade
of profound trouble for Hefner and the Playboy enterprise. Like
a stampede, a host of problems — political, cultural, economic,
personal — pounded down upon the publisher and his entertainment
empire and threatened to demolish it. A trio of problems flared up
in 1980, foretelling that Hefner would enter the darkest period of his
life, both professionally and personally. As events unfolded, it was far
from certain whether he would survive.

In mid-October 1980, a series of newspaper and television ads
appeared in the Chicago media. Sponsored by the National Heritage
Foundation, a Christian consortium, they denounced Hefner as a
smut peddler spreading a message of “low-commitment sex, recre-
ational drugs, selfish materialism, and adolescent irresponsibility.”
They pointed to lascivious features in the twenty-fifth anniversary
edition of Playboy, quoted anti-Christian passages from the Playboy
Philosophy, and noted an epidemic of teenage pregnancies, divorces,
venereal diseases, fatherless children, and abortions sweeping through
modem America. “Playboy, perhaps more than anyone else in the
past 20 years, has called America to self-indulge as never before and
it appears that we are now reaping the results,” the ads stated. “It’s
becoming evident that popular hedonism will eventually wreck a
society.” 3

The timing of these media messages was no accident. They came
about two weeks before the presidential election, a contest in which
the Republican candidate, Governor Ronald Reagan of California,
had emerged at the head of a powerful new conservative movement.

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325

Aiming to create a stronger American posture in foreign affairs,
trim the welfare state, and renew commitment to the nuclear family,
religious standards, personal responsibility, and sexual restraint, this
crusade sought to reestablish traditional political, moral, and cultural
values at the center of American public life. The Reagan Revolution
had quietly taken root in the 1970s as a reaction against the wide-
spread political dissent, cultural rebellion, and social turmoil that
characterized 1960s America. As many Americans first grew befud-
dled, then angry, a gathering backlash saw local organizations spring
up around the country, often in the suburbs, in a grassroots political
network for the so-called New Right. Fervent opposition to the per-
missive morality of 1960s radicalism among disgruntled traditionalists
led to a parallel mobilization on the cultural front. Groups such as
the Moral Majority, founded by the Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1979,
emerged determined to reassert Christian morality in the American
political process. 4

A series of clashes in the 1970s had established Playboy as a key
target of the conservative insurgency. The dispute over passage of
the Equal Rights Amendment in Illinois, for instance, put Hefners
magazine at odds with the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. She
composed a ditty mocking Playboy’s support for the ERA and sang
it on the steps of the capital to the tune of “Here Comes Peter
Cottontail”: “Here comes Playboy Cottontail, Hopping down the
capital trail, Trying to buy the votes for ERA, / Telling every girl and
boy, / You can only have your joy, / Ry becoming gender free or gay.”
Playboy’s defense of the pom actor Harry Reems, Screw magazine
editor Al Goldstein, and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, all of whom
had been prosecuted by local communities on charges of obscen-
ity, also rankled traditionalists. While Hefner had rallied behind the
defendants on First Amendment grounds of opposing censorship,
angry conservatives saw the episodes as confirmation that he was a
pornographer at heart. In their minds, Playboy became associated
with hardcore magazines and films. 5

In the 1980 election, conservatives made cultural issues of personal
morality and responsibility a keystone of the Reagan run for the presi-
dency. Drawing upon the famous phrase of the Puritan leader John
Winthrop, Reagan declared his hope that America would “uphold
the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and — above
all — responsible liberty for every individual so that we will become

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MR. PLAYBOY

that shining city on a hill.” In his trademark smooth and earnest speaking
style, the former California governor repeatedly posed a wholesome
family life, personal responsibility, and traditional morality as anti-
dotes to social decay. He recruited Robert Billings, an organizer of
the Moral Majority, to join his campaign staff and in August 1980
journeyed to Dallas to address some fifteen thousand followers of the
Religious Roundtable, an organization of conservative Christians. “I’m
sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and perverts . . .
coming out of the closet. It’s time for God’s people to come out of the
closet,” he declared. Two months later, speaking at the annual meet-
ing of the National Religious Broadcasters, Reagan stated, “I don’t
believe we should have ever expelled God from the classroom.”
While Reagan never mentioned Playboy directly, other conservative
spokesmen did. William F. Buckley excoriated Hefner during the
campaign as a man who sought “to justify the superordination of sex
over all other considerations — loyalty to family, any principle of self-
discipline, any respect for privacy or chastity or modesty.” 6

The Moral Majority swung into action with particular force during
the 1980 campaign. These cultural conservatives rallied in support of
a traditional way of life under siege, seeing pornography, abortion,
the ERA, homosexual rights, and denial of school prayer as “a matter
of conscious plots [directed] at the traditional family and the peace-
ful neighborhood.” In this eruption of activism, Hefner appeared
as an agent of immorality and national decline. Falwell lashed out
at the publisher angrily and often. In his 1980 book Listen America !
the minister denounced the “cult of the playboy” as a threat to the
family while in speeches he declared, “People like Hugh Hefner and
Larry Flynt ought to be in the penitentiary.” He attacked “the Hugh
Hefners and the Jane Fondas, who weave their immoral philosophies
into the moral fabric of this country” and described the publisher
as “making a living from smut.” The Moral Majority Report even
accused Hefner’s magazine of standing at the center of a national
pornography-and-drugs network — supposedly, it also included
NORML founder Keith Stroup, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, and
Paul Krassner of The Realist — called the “Aquarian Conspiracy.” 7
While Hefner was not surprised by the conservative resurgence —
he had expected it since seeing public support for the police crack-
down during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago — its
vehemence galvanized him and inspired a spirited counterattack.

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327

Hefner portrayed his conservative detractors as revivalists for the
1950s sensibility he had opposed in founding Playboy. “Were fight-
ing some of the same fights again: abortion, censorship,” he argued,
with the Moral Majority aiming to regulate the content of school
libraries and television shows. Christie Hefner, now working for PEI,
supported this libertarian position, claiming that the Moral Majority
sought “to return women to the kitchen and prayers to the schools.”
Moreover, with their talk of boycotting Playboy advertisers and
screening the content of television shows, Falwell and his followers
were threatening the First Amendment. “IVe got to believe that the
majority of people, in fact, respect the right of others to choose what
they want to read and what they want to see,” she argued. 8

Hugh Hefner used Playboy to launch a full-bore attack on the
Moral Majority and the new conservative movement. It ran a scath-
ing piece, titled “The Reagan Question,” that accused Reagan of
being a hypocritical, communist-obsessed simpleton who pandered
to Moral Majoritarians, threatened nuclear war, repeated apocryphal
stories from notecards, and submitted to the directives of his drill-
sergeant wife. “The Astonishing Wrongs of the New Moral Right”
blasted the Falwell crowd as radicals who sought “to restructure
the entire framework of American society to fit a set of rigid, doc-
trinaire political and religious beliefs.” “Inside the New Right War
Machine” revealed the fund-raising and organizational maneuvers of
the conservative activists Richard Viguerie, Howard Philips, and Paul
Weyrich. The 1980 campaign represented “a religio-political attack
on personal freedom,” Playboy declared melodramatically. “There’s
a war going on and the bad guys are winning.” 9

Playboy also employed mockery. A parody titled “Prayboy:
Entertainment for Far- Righteous Men,” contained a pictorial on “The
Girls of the Moral Majority” and an article titled “Public Fibraries —
Must They Contain Rooks?” The “Prayboy Advisor” answered a
query from a puzzled, pious couple about the nature and location
of loins, often mentioned in the Rible: “All we can say is — you do have
loins. One set each. Rut, unfortunately, we can’t tell you where they
are.” In the “Prayboy Interview: GOD,” when the Almighty was asked
how to cleave to the path of righteousness, he replied, “Ry strug-
gling against the wicked wiles of Satan, by following My command-
ments, and by getting back the Panama Canal.” “Prayboy’s Purity
Jokes” began with the following: “Seems two liberals went back to

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MR. PLAYBOY

her place and indulged in fornication. Just as the two sinners reached
that moment of sexual union which is only permitted in holy matri-
mony, a truck crashed into her house and killed them dead and they
both went to hell.” A highlight of the mock issue was its centerfold,
“Mrs. December,” Norma-Beth Ewan, who posed in a pink housecoat
with her five children under a sampler reading “Stand by Your Man.”
Her data sheet noted that turnoffs included “people who call me Ms.
and the UN”; her favorite books were Deuteronomy and The Joy of
Cooking ; her favorite musician was Lawrence Welk. 10

But Hefners maneuvers, like those of the Democratic Party,
had little impact as Beagan crushed President Jimmy Carter in the
1980 election. This dawning of a new political age would reshape
American public life in profound ways for the next quarter cen-
tury. In the process, Hefner and Playboy became identified, by all
sides, as the antichrist of the newly triumphant conservatism. With
the battle lines clearly drawn, the only question concerned when all-
out war would begin.

The Beagan Bevolution was accompanied by a second discomfit-
ing development for Playboy that same year — the publication of a
controversial book that placed Hefner and his magazine at the center
of a cultural firestorm. For the better part of the 1970s, fueled by
a $3.8 million advance for publication and movie rights, noted “New
Journalist” Gay Talese had been engaged in a book project examin-
ing Americas sexual revolution. Amid intense press interest, Talese
explored the changing sexual landscape as a participant observer
who delved into X-rated movies, massage parlors, erotic literature,
infidelity and experimentation, swinging, and controversial new sexual
resorts and clubs such as Plato’s Betreat and Sandstone. The result
was Thy Neighbor’s Wife, a volume that appeared to tremendous
fanfare in 1980. Through a wealth of descriptive stories, the book
suggested that since midcentury, Americans gradually had aban-
doned taboos to embrace a new ethic of sexual freedom. A liberated
atmosphere had been created, Talese concluded, by “Americas new
openness about sex, its expanding erotic consumerism, and the quiet
rebellion . . . within the middle class against the censors and clerics
that had been an inhibiting force since the founding of the Puritan
republic.” 11

Hefner appeared as a central figure in Thy Neighbor’s Wife.
Talese had spent a good deal of time interviewing the publisher and

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hanging out at the Playboy Mansion, and he presented Hefners life
as emblematic of the sweeping liberation of American sexual values
since the 1950s. In the three long biographical sections, Talese exam-
ined Hefner’s childhood, the early stages of his career with Playboy,
and his more recent endeavors, particularly the tangled romance
with Barbi Benton and Karen Christy and the drug scandal that
took Bobbie Arnstein’s life. Full of colorful anecdotes and striking
prose, Talese ’s biographical account suggested Hefners success dem-
onstrated that “Americans everywhere were becoming increasingly
tolerant of, if not preoccupied with, various forms of sexual expres-
sion.” At the same time, Talese portrayed the publisher as a rest-
less, isolated, immature, somewhat neurotic figure whose search for
happiness remained unfulfilled. 12

While Thy Neighbor’s Wife quickly moved onto the best-seller
lists, it proved a huge critical disappointment. Reviewers generally
found it to be a tedious, sanctimonious, even grim account written
by a zealot for the cause of sexual liberation. “Dull as a double-feature
of x-rated movies,” said one. “ Thy Neighbors Wife read like a his-
tory of the Soviet Union written by Leonid Brezhnev,” said another.
Critics complained that Talese presented sex as a form of physical
gymnastics devoid of emotional meaning or human connection, and
dismissed the book as “the work of an undeniably aroused libido, but
a limp mind.” 13

Moreover, most reviewers concluded that the book distorted
modern American sex life. The mass of ordinary Americans — those
who “enjoy sex as a wonderful part of life but do not make it a cause
celebre, who are neither appalled nor entranced by their bodies” —
were ignored in favor of a tiny fringe of erotic experimenters. This
focus on radical dissenters made the book appear anachronistic, a
cultural relic from the age of “flower children and psychedelic drugs.”
As one critic noted, “what might have been groundbreaking five years
ago is now as moribund as poor Sandstone, which, although Talese
typically neglects to mention it, is no longer open for business.” 14

Ideology colored many of the evaluations. Liberal commentators
scoffed at Talese s chauvinist focus on middle-aged men looking for
action and his neglect of women, homosexuals, children, and many
others impacted by the changing social mores of the sexual revo-
lution. The more sophisticated, such as Alexander Cockbum, cited
Michel Foucault and lectured Talese for ignoring the likelihood

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MR. PLAYBOY

that instead of striking a blow against the system, “the ruses of
sexuality” constituted merely another form of subjugation in late
capitalist society. Conservatives were even more hostile, portraying
Thy Neighbors Wife as a manifesto for social recklessness. Talese,
they complained, simply ignored the heavy social costs of the sexual
revolution: the undermining of love, marriage, and the family struc-
ture and an increase in divorce, venereal disease, abortions, teenage
pregnancies, and the sexual exploitation of females. His own stories
confirmed that the sexual revolution produced mostly “emotional
impoverishment and desperate boredom,” wrote one reviewer.
“Perhaps the merit of Thy Neighbor’s Wife is that it laid bare the
desolate spectacle .” 15

Hefner was caught in the critical crossfire. Many commentators
skewered Mr. Playboy as the supreme symbol of the shallow sexual
hijinks described in this overblown book . 16 Far from being a social
revolutionary, Hefner appeared to most reviewers as an overgrown
adolescent committed mainly to his own pleasure. The publisher
and his ilk, according to one, were “distressingly shallow,” with “self-
gratification their only concern.” Ellen Goodman ridiculed Hefner and
his acolytes for being “pathetically stuck in the traditional male mode;
stuck in sad old fantasies; stuck as eternal adolescents proving they can
do what mommy told them was naughty .” 17 Critics took special aim at
Hefner s life at the mansion, which they characterized as a portrait in
insipidity: the publisher “on his circular rotating bed, surrounded by
half a dozen nude bunnies, each one of whom is gently massaging him
with oil, while a TV camera records the love session for future refer-
ence and his butler stands by to play and replay ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon.’”
As one critic concluded derisively, this “adolescent utopia” consisted of
“bunnies, backgammon, and Pepsi-Cola — what a life .” 18

Hefner, too, was unhappy with Talese s depiction of him. He com-
plained that the book underplayed his crucial role in the sexual revolu-
tion while wildly distorting his romantic escapades. Talese also made
him appear frustrated and unhappy, Hefner groused, when in fact
he loved his life. A hostile review in Playboy caused Talese to con-
clude that Hefner was out to get him, and Hefner only confused mat-
ters when he agreed that his magazine s assessment of Thy Neighbor’s
Wife was unfair. “I’m sorry that it ever appeared in Playboy,” he said
publicly, while in a private note he apologized to Talese for the review
not only because it “attempts to trivialize an important work, but

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331

because I think Playboy should applaud any serious effort of this sort
that attempts to humanize our sexuality.” 19

Ultimately, the intellectual street fight prompted by the publica-
tion of Thy Neighbors Wife in 1980 left Hefner bruised. He and
Talese appeared as partners in cultural crime, as hucksters peddling
an elixir of “liberated” sexuality brewed in the Swinging Seventies.
Observers of every ideological stripe interpreted their message of
sexual freedom not as inspirational, but as an embarrassing exercise
in juvenile, narcissistic hedonism. Caught between a conservative
Scylla, who loathed him for his undermining of traditional morality,
and a progressive Charybdis, who scorned him for failing to replace
it with anything meaningful, the Playboy publisher found himself in
an increasingly isolated position. Symbolically, Thy Neighbors Wife
seemed to bring the curtain down on the drama of sexual insurrection
played out during the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the audience turned
away, more from distaste than hostility.

However jarring Reagans election and Talese s book were in 1980,
they receded before the upheaval caused by Dorothy Stratten s tragic
murder that same year. This horrible event struck very close to home,
traumatizing Hefner personally and throwing his circle of friends and
associates at the mansion into an emotional tailspin. He had known
the young woman well, and entertained high hopes for her success,
and her senseless killing unnerved him. To make matters worse, as
details gradually emerged about the train of events leading to her
death, a troubling picture emerged — of rapid, dazzling success leav-
ing a vapor trail of manipulation and frustration, marital infidelity and
frustrated ambition, jealousy and sadistic revenge.

Stratten first arrived at the Playboy Mansion West in 1978 at age
eighteen, a gorgeous but unsophisticated girl who had never been
on an airplane before. Born and raised in Vancouver, Dorothy Ruth
Hoogstraten came from a difficult family background. Abandoned
by her father, the girl and her family had lived in a succession of
rough neighborhoods, supported by her mothers labors as a house-
keeper, before finally securing a house in a working-class suburb. At
age fourteen, Dorothy began working at the Dairy Queen to help
pay the bills and gain a bit of spending money. Within a couple of
years, the tall, skinny, awkward girl began to fill out, with her Dutch
heritage producing a striking physical package of blond hair, blue
eyes, high cheekbones, and a voluptuous figure. During her senior

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MR. PLAYBOY

year in high school, the young beauty met Paul Snider, the man who
would become the central figure in her short life. He came into the
Dairy Queen one afternoon, driving a Datsun sports coupe, wearing
a long fur coat and lizardskin boots with spurs, and flashing a variety
of gaudy rings and neck chains. Struck by his blond waitress, he got
her phone number and after several tries procured a date. 20

Snider was a small-time hustler who had dropped out of school as
a teenager. Variously a pimp, car show promoter, and narcotics dealer,
he saw in Stratten both a romantic prospect and a potential meal
ticket. Perceiving the beauty blooming beneath the dowdy clothes
and sweet temperament, he quickly set himself to winning the young
blonde s devotion. Over the objections of her family, Snider wooed
Stratten romantically, showering her with presents and impressing
her with inflated talk about his career. A Svengali figure, he chose her
clothes and makeup while looking for an opportunity to market
her striking beauty. His chance appeared in the summer of 1978. 21

As part of Playboy’s Great Playmate Hunt to find a centerfold
for its twenty- fifth anniversary issue, the Vancouver photographer
Ken Honey, who had discovered several Canadian Playmates over
the years, was scouting for prospective candidates. Snider convinced
Stratten to go for a test shoot, and after the session Honey sent about
a dozen color shots to Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy’s photo editor in
Los Angeles. Struck immediately, Grabowski called Honey and had
him arrange a flight for Stratten to Los Angeles while she set up a
shoot with glamour photographer Mario Casilli. Snider was annoyed
because it had been arranged for Stratten to travel alone, but he
relented and his girlfriend set off on the adventure of her life. 22

Stratten s shoot went beautifully, and for several days she resided
at the guesthouse at the Playboy Mansion. Although overwhelmed by
the stately residence and nervous at meeting Hefner and mingling
with celebrities, the young woman made a memorable impression
with her sweet temperament and good looks. Grabowski assured her
that a Playmate appearance was certain, so Stratten flew home to
Vancouver, quit her job, and returned to Los Angeles for an extended
stay at the mansion. Snider, suspicious that Dorothy was slipping away
from him, called three or four times a day to Stratten, Grabowski, and
Casilli. When the photographer and his crew accompanied Stratten
back to Vancouver to do some location shots, Snider met them at the
airport in a rented limousine and snapped, “You guys take the cab.

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333

The limo is for Dorothy and me.” He began to pressure Stratten to
get married, and after much hesitation she reluctantly agreed to an
engagement. The couple moved to Los Angeles. 23

Stratten began a magical rise. She came in second for Playboy’s
twenty-fifth anniversary Playmate — primarily because of her
inexperience — but was slated to appear as the August 1979 Playmate.
Meanwhile, she and Snider took up residence in a small Westwood
apartment. Stratten worked as a Bunny in the Los Angeles Playboy
Club and took acting lessons, and he pushed several unsuccessful
promotional schemes: wet T-shirt contests, male strippers, a “hand-
somest man in LA” contest. In June 1979, she succumbed to Sniders
pressure and married him in Las Vegas, having told Grabowski, “I owe
it to him. I was a nobody when he found me.” A few weeks later, with
her Playmate issue on sale, Stratten signed with an agent and secured
several small parts in films and television shows. She appeared promi-
nently in the October 1979 ABC broadcast The Playboy Roller Disco
and Pajama Party. Selected as the 1980 Playmate of the Year, Stratten
won the title role in the feature film Galaxina, a science fiction satire,
a few weeks later. 24

Throughout this period, Stratten and Snider drew contrasting
reactions at the mansion. Hefner and his friends loved her and, uni-
versally, viewed him as a “creep.” Snider, with his satin shirts, flashy
gold chains, mink coat, and grandiose manners, alienated those with
whom he tried to ingratiate himself. Hefner, who had become some-
thing of a father figure to Stratten, loathed Snider on sight and had
him checked out with the Vancouver police. He urged the young
woman to avoid rushing into marriage, even when she asked him to
give her away at the wedding, and banned him from the mansion
grounds unless he was with Stratten. 25

As Stratten s prospects soared, Sniders hold over her unraveled.
His various plans to market her image — a poster of her roller skat-
ing in a skimpy outfit, a perfume, a photo book — floundered even
as he became more insistent on handling her financial affairs. He
commandeered her income, pocketing most of her paychecks and
purchasing a Mercedes 450SE for his own use while she drove a
1967 Mercury Cougar. Such high-handed treatment finally alienated
his wife, who hired her own financial manager, Bobert Houston. He
set up Dorothy Stratten Enterprises, and thereafter her income was
deposited into a corporate account from which she, but not Snider,

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MR. PLAYBOY

could withdraw funds. Only a monthly stipend was placed in a joint
checking account. An infuriated Snider bullied and berated Stratten
to tears and the relationship crumbled. 26

Tensions reached a crisis point when Peter Bogdanovich, one of
Hollywood’s hottest young directors, chose Stratten for a part in his
new film, They All Laughed, a romantic comedy with John Ritter,
Ben Gazzara, and Audrey Hepburn. They had met at the mansion
and Bogdanovich had asked her to read for the part. Smitten by her
beauty and impressed with her acting instincts, he had put her in
the film in the part of the love interest for Ritter. In March 1980,
Stratten flew off to New York City for several weeks of shooting and,
unbeknownst to everyone, began an affair with Bogdanovich. By all
accounts, the two fell in love and Stratten determined finally to end
her relationship with Snider. First, she asked for a separation in a
letter, writing, “I want to be free. Let the bird fly. If you love me,
you’ll let me go.” In June, she saw an attorney and declared their
physical and financial separation, even though she wanted to arrange
a generous monetary settlement for Snider. 27

Her husband reacted with rage and desperation. He hired a
private detective to tail his wife and Bogdanovich, trying to get evi-
dence for an alienation-of-affections lawsuit. He badgered Houston,
demanding cash outlays and threatening to sue for half of his wife’s
future income. Stratten, determined to have an amicable parting, met
with Snider in late July to discuss a divorce settlement. She agreed to
meet him again on August 14. Meanwhile, Snider purchased a sec-
ondhand twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun and a box of shells. Stratten
came to the house that they once shared about noon. Later that eve-
ning, after several phone calls to Snider went unanswered, friends
entered the abode and found two naked bodies and blood every-
where. Snider had shot Stratten point-blank in the side of the head
before turning the gun on himself. He also had sexually assaulted her,
both before and after her death. The next morning, the Los Angeles
Times headline blared out news of the horrifying murder- suicide:
“Playmate of Year Slain.” 28

This dreadful episode generated shock waves that buffeted Hefner
and the Playboy empire. A chorus of criticism described Stratten as a
victim of the publisher’s exploitative media machine. “It’s time some-
one takes a good hard look behind the glamorous facade of Hugh
Hefner and the Playboy organization,” declared an indignant letter to

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335

a Los Angeles newspaper. Another critic accused Playboy of creating
an atmosphere in which sleazy characters such as Snider flourished.
“If there had been no market for pictures of her, perhaps there would
have been no beginning to the ‘meal ticket’ philosophy that led to her
death,” he argued. “Hefner created both the Playmate dream and the
deadly nightmare.” 29

Feminists blasted Hefner and Playboy for nurturing an exploit-
ative attitude toward women. About three months after the murder,
for instance, Teresa Carpenter published “Death of a Playmate” in
the Village Voice, an article that was reprinted in many newspapers
and would go on to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.
She argued that three men had sought to use Stratten for their own
ends — Hefner, Bogdanovich, and Snider — and that while the latter
had pulled the trigger, all bore responsibility for the tragedy. The young
woman, she wrote, had been the “catalyst for a cycle of ambitions which
revealed its players less wicked, perhaps, than pathetic.” Her critique
of Hefner and his magazine was searing. Stratten was a “corporate
treasure,” argued Carpenter, whom Playboy, which had never really
produced a major actress, “thought was going to be the biggest thing
they ever had,” while Hefner hoped to gain legitimacy in Hollywood
by creating a star, a “Marion Davies to call his own.” Snider, the author
continued, had been a pitiful creature of the Playboy ethos:

The irony that Hefner does not perceive — or at least fails to
acknowledge — is that Stratten was destroyed not by random
particulars, but by a germ breeding within the [Playboy]
ethic. One of the tacit tenets of the Playboy philosophy — that
women can be possessed — had found a fervent adherent in
Paul Snider. He had bought the dream without qualification,
and he thought of himself as perhaps one of Playboy’s most
honest apostles. He acted out dark fantasies never intended
to be realized.

Snider, Carpenter claimed, did what many male readers of Playboy
probably yearned to do: “instead of fondling himself in private, instead
of wreaking abstract violence upon a centerfold, he ravaged a play-
mate in the flesh.” 30

A horrified Hefner denied that Playboy had exploited Stratten.
“To whatever degree Playboy may have benefited, Dorothy benefited

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MR. PLAYBOY

a great deal more, and would have continued to benefit a great deal
more,” he passionately insisted. “The next film she was reading for
and likely would have gotten would have brought her $100,000 and
without question, the happiest time of her life was in that last year,
year and a half.” He reminded listeners that Snider had a record of
abusive behavior toward Stratten. Hefner also threw himself into a
long article on Stratten s life for Playboy, large sections of which he
personally rewrote and shaped in the first extensive writing he had
done since the Playboy Philosophy two decades earlier. The piece
contended that Playboy had consistently promoted the lifting of female
subjugation — “economically, socially, sexually” — and Snider was “a very
sick guy” who “couldn’t stand to see Dorothy become an independent
human being, with a mind of her own, a body of her own, a life of her
own.” As for the Carpenter article, it was “a viciously anti-Playboy,
anti-male diatribe” that “fabricated facts . . . and invented imaginary
motivations.” Hefner also pointed out that Carpenter had sold the
motion picture rights to her article to the director Bob Fosse, who
would go on to make Star 80, for more than $125,000. “So much for
the exploitation of Dorothy Stratten,” he concluded. 31

Stratten s death, and the public reaction to it, hurt Hefner deeply.
It joined Bobbie Arnstein’s suicide as one of the most “irrational,
painful, horrifying” events of his life, he said later. In concert with the
Reagan election and the Talese contretemps, it also portended
the beginning of a grim era for Hefner and Playboy. Increasingly, he
appeared cornered into an isolated position in the broader culture.
Reviled by the newly triumphant conservative movement, the pub
lisher and his magazine also were increasingly unwelcome among the
progressives whose ranks he yearned to lead. These dispiriting devel-
opments, in fact, introduced a protracted decade of travail for Hefner
in the 1980s. As soon became apparent, the troubling events of 1980
took place against a backdrop of larger financial problems that brought
Playboy Enterprises, Inc., to the precipice of collapse. 32

On October 14, 1980, a euphoric Victor Lownes strode out of a
London courtroom. More than a year earlier, as head of Playboy
Enterprises Inc.’s enormously profitable gaming operation, he had

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337

engineered the purchase of the Victoria Sporting Club in London.
The acquisition had made Playboy the biggest gambling enterprise in
Britain. But English officials had thrown up a temporary roadblock,
denying Playboy a gaming license for the facility because of illegal
activity by the previous owners. In an appeal before a London court,
however, Playboy attorneys successfully argued that the company’s
unblemished reputation would produce a strict adherence to all gam-
ing rules. After the license was granted, an exultant Lownes cabled
the good news to Hefner in Los Angeles. In the manner of Julius
Caesar’s famous report on his conquest of Gaul (Veni, vidi, vici: “I
came, I saw, I conquered”), Lownes wrote, “victoria victorious,

VISION VINDICATED, VALUE VERIFIED, VERILY VICTOR .” 33

Lowness elation appeared justified. Over the last fifteen years, the
indubitable bad boy of PEI had built a gaming empire in England
that profited both the company and himself. After functioning as a key
operative in the growing Playboy organization in the 1950s, he had
left the company for a time, then rejoined in 1964 after convincing
Hefner to appoint him an officer in Playboy Clubs International and
let him launch Playboy Clubs in England. When Britain regularized
gambling laws with the 1968 Gaming Act, Lownes took full advantage.
Within a few years he had established casinos at the Playboy Club
and the posh Clermont Club in London, opened Playboy casinos in
Portsmouth and Manchester, and created a web of betting shops and
bingo parlors around the country. 34

Throughout the 1970s, as the general financial fortunes of PEI
declined, those of its English gaming division soared. Much of it came
from an influx of Arab oil money as Saudis, in particular, flocked to
London to indulge a fondness for gambling. Lownes welcomed them
into the Playboy casinos, and soon it was not uncommon to see wealthy
Arabs lose $500,000 in a single night’s activity. In fiscal 1980, the Wall
Street Journal calculated, the English Playboy casinos accounted for
85 percent of the company’s earnings. As the new decade opened,
financial analysts agreed that PEI’s English gaming was keeping the
company afloat. 35

This tremendous success made Victor Lownes the talk of English
society. As the highest-paid executive in Britain — his yearly salary
of $600,000 per year was larger than that of PEI’s president, Derick
Daniels — he rubbed shoulders with many of England’s rich and
famous. In 1972 he purchased a country estate, Stocks, about an hour

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MR. PLAYBOY

from London, that became the setting for a flamboyant and highly
publicized lifestyle. Its stately mansion with nineteen bedrooms,
four cottages, several outbuildings, and a stable, soon saw the addi-
tion of tennis and squash courts, a whirlpool and Jacuzzi, a pinball
arcade, and a swimming pool. Lownes became an avid fox hunter
and participated in high-society horse events with the likes of Prince
Charles. On weekends he hosted a perpetual party at Stocks attended
by actors, musicians, writers, and celebrities such as Peter Sellers,
Roman Polanski, Peter Cook, and members of Monty Python. The
estate also functioned as a Bunny training school for the clubs and
casinos, which meant that PEI covered many of the estate’s oper-
ating costs. The constant presence of dozens of attractive young
women at Stocks contributed to Lownes s legendary love life. By the
1970s, the PEI executive had created a lavish social scene that rivaled
Hefners. 36

Then Lownes fell victim to his own hubris. In late 1979, he moved
against Playboys biggest competitor in British gaming, Ladbrokes
Ltd., headed by the powerful businessman Cyril Stein. A series
of investigative reports detailing unethical and illegal activity at
Ladbrokes had appeared in a British magazine, and during the result-
ing uproar Lownes decided to play the reformer. He formally chal-
lenged the renewal of his competitor s gambling license and helped
force Ladbrokes out of the gambling business. A furious Stein prom-
ised retaliation, and he kept his promise. A few weeks later, police
and Gaming Board inspectors raided Playboy casinos in London and
confiscated records and files. Stein, it turned out, had paid informers
to reveal improprieties in the Playboy operation — giving free club
membership to hotel porters who steered wealthy guests to Playboy
casinos, accepting false checks from wealthy gamblers to extend them
credit, and allowing company directors to gamble in their own facility.
There were also accusations that wealthy Arabs had procured Bunnies
for their friends. The police and the Gaming Board announced that
they would challenge the renewal of Playboys gambling license
because of such improprieties. 37

As this crisis escalated, Hefner, along with Derick Daniels and
corporate managers in Chicago, grew increasingly worried. In late
March they summoned Lownes to a special meeting at the mansion
in Los Angeles to discuss matters. He offered breezy reassurances
that his reputation for honest management would prevail, but was

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rather unconvincing, partly because he was still groggy after suffering
a serious concussion in a horseback riding accident. Meanwhile, law-
yers and business experts in England told Hefner and Daniels that
the situation was beginning to unravel. Complicating matters was
the fact that Lownes and Daniels were engaged in a corporate power
struggle wi t hin PEI. Lownes believed that profits from his division
were supporting inept corporate management in Chicago, while
Daniels contended that the English operation had been functioning
independently without any kind of corporate control from PEI. 38

Finally, after several weeks of deliberation and conferences,
Hefner decided to act. Convinced that loss of English casino revenue
would scuttle PEI, and told by the company’s English counsel that
Lowness continued presence made that inevitable, he sent Daniels to
London to ask the company’s chief of operations in England to resign on
April 15, 1981. A furious Lownes stalked out of the meeting. He told
the press that his sacking was “stupid” and “an absurdity” and lashed
out at PEI management as small-minded bureaucrats who spent their
time “sorting through Social Security numbers and personnel files.”
In a bitter letter to Hefner, he accused Daniels and his team of con-
cocting a “plan to destroy my reputation in order to realize their
inordinate ambition to take over the gaming operations and thereby
justify their existence.” 39

Hefner stuck to his guns. “Your suggestion that all this is some
sort of corporate plot to ruin your reputation is simply untrue and
ignores the most obvious facts of the situation,” he wrote to Lownes.
He defended his decision as in the best interests of the company.
The decision to fire Lownes, he stated in a press conference, was a
painful one because of their long friendship but “the only appropri-
ate action.” He admitted that losing its British gaming license would
present “a very serious problem” for PEI, but insisted that the objec-
tions were minor and could be resolved. 40

Hefner’s optimism proved misplaced. PEI scrambled to salvage
the situation by hiring Sir John Treacher, a British businessman and
former admiral in the Royal Navy, to replace Lownes. The move back-
fired. The Gaming Board saw it as proof that the American parent
company controlled its British operation, and foreign control of casinos
in England was prohibited by the Gaming Act. As a result, British
magistrates decided against Playboy in an initial licensing hearing
in early October, ruling that the company was “not fit.” Less than a

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MR. PLAYBOY

month later, PEI announced the sale of its entire English gambling
operation to a British company for only $31.4 million, which experts
calculated to be about one-tenth of its value. The whole situation was
a disaster, an analyst told the Wall Street Journal: “The loss of two-
thirds of your earnings is never a pleasant prospect.” 41

But the London debacle prefaced an even larger financial calamity
for PEI. The company had bet much of its future on a huge casino
project in Atlantic City, taking advantage of a 1976 referendum that
legalized gambling on the boardwalk. PEI joined with the Elsinore
Corporation to build a huge hotel-casino, and in early 1979, con-
struction began on a twenty-four-story, five-hundred-room gambling
palace that would cost some $135 million over the next two years.
According to Business Week, the company had invested “half its
total equity” in the project, but with after-tax profits predicted to be
around $30 million a year, Hefner, PEI president Derick Daniels, and
Victor Lownes deemed it a sound investment. 42

Many outsiders, however, thought it was a risky venture. They
pointed out that strict regulations on advertising, fierce competition
among existing casinos in Atlantic City, and a slumping American
economy dimmed the chances for success. Playboys past history —
failures with movies, books, and records and evaporating profits in its
clubs and resorts — also inspired little confidence that its expansion
into gambling would thrive. In the opinion of one business journal,
Playboys plans in Atlantic City “seem about as chancy as Hefners
earlier efforts turned out to be.” 43

The collapse of Playboys gambling operation in England pro-
vided the first sign of trouble. The director of the state s Division
of Gaming Enforcement demanded that Lownes and three of his
managers step aside from any involvement in Atlantic City before a
temporary operating permit would be granted. They did so, the per-
mit was granted, and the Playboy Hotel and Casino began temporary
operation in early April. Hefner even visited the new facility later
in the month, arriving like a “conquering emperor,” in the words of
the local newspaper. But the English failure clouded the future.
“I find it very difficult to believe that a company that is unlicensable
in another jurisdiction would be licensable in New Jersey,” noted a
business analyst in the Wall Street Journal. 44

In November 1981, the Division of Gaming Enforcement decided
to oppose Playboys request for a permanent gambling license.

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341

It cited concerns about several episodes in the history of Hefners
organization: the old canard about payments to the New York State
Liquor Authority in the early 1960s, the Bobbie Arnstein drug inves-
tigation in the early 1970s, the loss of the London licenses, and the
false change that led Hefner s hiring of a Chicago attorney with links
to organized crime. Hefner and PEI management were stunned, hav-
ing expected a smooth road to approval. Now hearings before the
New Jersey Casino Control Commission were scheduled for January
1982, and license approval would require the approval of four of the
five commissioners. 45

Playboys Atlantic City casino and, perhaps, its future as a com-
pany hung in the balance as Hefner journeyed to Atlantic City to
appear as the first witness. His testimony, as the public symbol of the
corporation, would be crucial. But when the publisher arrived on
January 11 for his first day of questioning, things unfolded inauspi-
ciously. He entered in the company of Shannon Tweed, a tall, stun-
ning blonde who was a recent Playmate and his current girlfriend,
and she attracted more attention than he did. Dressed in a blue busi-
ness suit and tie, Hefner looked weary. In fact, he had been up much
of the night fighting with Tweed, and had popped a couple of dexies
to stay awake. 46

Hefner s testimony was a disaster. Later he decried his treatment
as “the Atlantic City Inquisition,” but much of the problem resulted
from lack of preparation. States attorney James Flanagan ques-
tioned the publisher on several matters — particularly the payments
PEI made to New York officials in the early 1960s to get a liquor
license for the New York Playboy Club. Hefner explained, correctly,
that they had been a response to extortion rather than an attempt at
bribery, but was unable to recall whether he had been granted immu-
nity in the grand jury inquiry and could not remember salient events
and policies. When questioned about the London casino collapse,
he confessed that “inappropriate and improper” things had been
done in England that “we did not know about.” When asked about
innocent business relationships with Joe DeCarlo and John Dante,
friends with shady reputations, he was unable to recollect details
about their dealings. Throughout, Hefner referred to having only
“islands of recollection” and professed ignorance about ranking
officials and major events in his company’s history. Once, unable to
recall some point, he tried to joke, “Ask me whom I was dating.”

342

MR. PLAYBOY

Under pressure, he also admitted that he had not even read the DGE
report before testifying. 47

Hefners inept performance proved fatal. A seasoned observer of
these hearings told the press that “never before had he seen a casino
executive so ill-prepared, so unable to answer basic facts about his
company.” The commissioners voted to deny Playboy and Hefner the
permanent license, deeming them “unfit and unwelcome to operate a
casino in New Jersey.” Three of the commissioners voted in favor of
the license, recognizing that PETs payments to the liquor authority
had been the result of extortion. But two voted no, describing Hefner’s
testimony as “insincere” and denouncing him for “a failure ... to
exhibit the forthright candor he had to display.” Flanagan agreed that
“Hefner was a terrible witness” and observed that when he admitted
that he had not bothered to read the investigative report into his own
company, it was the beginning of the end. Hefner had been done in
not by corruption or dishonesty — his personal ethics were impec-
cable — but by his absence from the company he had started. 48

The decision sent Hefner and PEI reeling. While the commis-
sion had left an opening — the company could still gain the license
if it presented a plan to divorce itself from Hefner — such a course
was unthinkable. Thus PEI arranged to sell its interest in the casino
and hotel to the Elsinore Corporation for $58.5 million, with only
$7.6 million coming in cash while the balance was covered by an
unsecured note. The Atlantic City fire sale was a devastating blow
that drained funds, sent company stock plunging, and cut off future
revenues. Many outsiders thought PEI might collapse entirely. 49

As financial fallout from this disaster rained down, Hefner took a
drastic measure to save his enterprise. Three weeks after the denial
of the Atlantic City gambling license, he called in Derick Daniels
and asked him to resign. “Fine, Hef. If that’s what you think, that’s
what we’re going to do,” Daniels replied. With typical flamboyance,
he departed the meeting in his white leather jumpsuit, climbed into
a chauffeured Mercedes, and was driven to the opera as he sipped
champagne from a bottle wrapped in a white towel. Daniels’s easy
acceptance of the decision came in part from a generous severance
package of $470,000. But it also came from knowledge that Hefner
already had a replacement in mind — his eldest child, Christie, age
twenty-nine. On April 28, 1982, she became the new president of
Playboy Enterprises, Inc. 50

THE DARK DECADE

343

III

Christie Hefner had joined PEI in 1975 as a “special assistant” to
her father following graduation from Brandeis, where the English
major had been selected for Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa
cum laude. She took on several projects over the next few years. She
operated Playtique, a boutique in the Playboy Building, managed
public relations for the yearlong twenty-fifth anniversary celebration
of Playboy, and chaired the New Publications Group, a company
committee charged with evaluating new magazine opportunities.
According to Daniels, when he became president in 1976, it was
understood that training Christie was part of his charge. By 1978
she had became a corporate vice president and publisher of a pair of
Playboy consumer guides. While none of these early projects were
rousing successes, the younger Hefner gained plaudits throughout
PEI for her incisive intelligence, articulate manner, and attention
to business detail. “In contrast to ‘lief,’ she has an affinity for bal-
ance sheets, a tolerance for daylight office hours, and a gregarious
personality,” Fortune noted. Thus she stood poised to take control of
the company as the “Hare Apparent,” and the casino catastrophes
of 1981-1982 cleared the path for her to step in. 51

Christie brought several compelling attributes to the table. First, she
enjoyed the full trust of her father. While he had been far from an ideal
parent, leaving his wife and children in the mid-1950s, he stayed on good
terms with Millie after their divorce and maintained regular contact
with his children, Christie and David, and supported them and their
mother financially. In Millie’s words, her daughter accepted Hugh as “a
self-involved but feeling person” and enjoyed her occasional visits to
the Chicago mansion. While the relationship was somewhat distant,
Christie admired her father for his intelligence, kindness, and progres-
sive social views. Many long talks during her adolescence strength-
ened the bond to her father. Midway through college, she decided to
change her name back to Hefner, which touched him deeply — her
name had been altered when her mother remarried — and father and
daughter grew steadily closer. After asking her to join the company, Hugh
clearly began to see her as his successor. “She has the qualities I’m look-
ing for. Intelligence, creativity, good communication with me, a good
natural leadership style, and a high profile that works to her advantage
both inside and outside the company. She’s a good communicator,”

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MR. PLAYBOY

he told the press after appointing her president. To friends and
associates, the delighted publisher often commented, “If Christie
didn’t exist, Playboy’s promotion department might want to invent
her.” Many observers shared his confidence, with one publication
describing her as “a no-nonsense executive who was fast becoming
the Katharine Graham of the Midwest.” 52

Christie Hefner also offered another attractive asset. As a talented,
ambitious, and articulate woman, she helped negate the feminist accu-
sation that Playboy embodied sexism and misogyny. In fact, soon after
joining PEI she became the leading spokesperson for a new Playboy
that was sensitive to womens rights. Possessing a savvy political sensi-
bility — particularly influenced by her mother s Democratic activism,
she had grown up campaigning for Hubert Humphrey and Illinois
senator Paul Douglas — she was a Jimmy Carter delegate to the 1980
Democratic Convention. She publicly backed the ERA and abortion
rights with speeches and fund-raisers, causing Gloria Allred of NOW
to praise her as “one of the most articulate, committed, hardworking
feminists in the entire country.” She stood up to critics who insisted
that Playboy exploited women. “Playboy has been more supportive of
feminist politics and philosophies than most other companies I know
of — in its attitude toward hiring and promotion of women, through
its editorial and financial support of the Equal Rights Amendment
and abortion,” she replied. “I think people who make the leap that
because it chooses to picture women as sexually attractive, that some-
how that goes hand in hand with thinking that women are stupid or
women belong in the bedroom, are making a leap of faith that has
nothing to do with the magazine.” 53

PEPs new president needed every available ounce of talent, energy,
and paternal support upon taking the helm in 1982. She faced a tall
order. Ruffeted by falling stock prices, mounting losses, and predic-
tions of a grim future, the company appeared in desperate straits.
Christie embraced the most reasonable strategy available: push the
company to divest itself of unprofitable projects and rebuild its base.
In 1981, under Daniels, PEI had jettisoned the unprofitable Great
Gorge and Lake Geneva resorts, and the younger Hefner continued
down this path. She negotiated the sale of Playboy Rooks and insti-
tuted stringent cost-cutting measures that slashed corporate over-
head by some $8 million a year during her first few months in office.
She also formulated plans to move the company into the new area

THE DARK DECADE

345

of cable television and explored publishing a magazine for modem
women. The younger Hefner announced publicly that she planned
to concentrate on “the restructuring of Playboy from a broadly based
corporation to a clearly focused communications company .” 54

Hugh Hefner was pleased and relieved when his daughter tack-
led the financial problems besetting his beloved enterprise. Her
engagement eased his disengagement from the business aspects of
PEI, which he found increasingly abhorrent. During the early stages
of the London crisis, a frustrated Hefner had exploded: “Do you
know what I really wish? I really wish that all of my executives could
just . . . go . . . away . . . and the money would keep coming in!” He
admitted to the Wall Street Journal that “the business world really
doesn’t appeal to me” and made a curiously revealing confession in a
nationally televised interview: “If I have a failure as a businessman, it
probably is in the business area.” Hefner was delighted to pull back
and focus on the big picture while his daughter handled the tough
business details of running PEI . 55

But a growing array of problems refused to release their grip
on the publisher. Professionally, with the slamming of casino doors
and the popping of critical sniper fire providing a threatening back-
drop, Hefner and his assistants attempted to revamp his magazine
and make it relevant for a new era. Personally, he showed signs of
wanting to settle down in a more conventional romantic relationship.
Neither project proved very successful.

The Party's Over

I n August 1986, Hugh Hefner made the cover of Newsweek, but
I in an unfortunate fashion. The long feature article, titled “The
I Party’s Over,” announced that the Playboy empire was in shambles
and about to collapse. Over the last couple of decades, it argued,
the magazine had fallen from its pinnacle of hipness in American
culture as “the publisher and America gradually drifted apart.” Now
an array of political, economic, and social problems were pressing
in from every direction. Clearly, the fun and games had ended as
Hefner, “the Peter Pan of porn,” faced a challenge that threatened
to overwhelm him: “figuring out where he and his vision fit into con-
temporary society.” 1

The Newsweek piece was distressingly typical. Criticism of the
Playboy lifestyle built to a crescendo in the 1980s as Hefner and his
magazine came under attack, it seemed, from every direction. In the
media, among the critics, and for a popular audience that continued
to shrink steadily, the publisher increasingly appeared as a pioneering
cultural figure whose time had passed.

But Hefner did not go gently into that good night. Along with
his editors, he struggled to revamp Playboy and make it relevant

346

THE PARTY’S OVER

347

to a new age. In his private life, he sought to settle down in a
traditional, one-on-one pairing in two successive relationships. But
frustration mounted as the magazine spun its wheels, the company’s
losses mounted, and his romantic life became subject to unprece-
dented turbulence. For Hefner, a dark decade turned a deeper shade
of black.

“It is Hefner bashing season,” Rolling Stone announced in 1986.
A “disillusionment with Playboyism” had set in, observed the leading
journal of Americas up-to-the-minute younger set. “Admiration and
envy during Hefners ascendant, golden years . . . have given way to
general distaste.” In the previous decade, with the waning of 1960s
social activism and experimentation, Hefner had blunted criticism
and regained some cultural purchase by channeling the introspec-
tive energies of the Me Decade. But now a chorus of commentators
pictured Playboy as not just wrongheaded or ideologically suspect,
but something much worse: irrelevant. 2

Much of the denunciation was familiar. Conservatives embold-
ened by the Reagan ascendancy attacked Hefner and his magazine as
agents of moral decay. Conservative Digest, for instance, reviled the
publishers support of recreational sex, legalized drugs, abortion on
demand, and homosexuality, contending that such ideas “have been
destroying our society.” The rise of AIDS added a sense of looming
threat as the sexual revolution pioneered by Hefner “has dissolved in
confusion and disillusionment” with the spread of this deadly social
disease, claimed the Chicago Tribune. Many critics added the familiar
refrain of sexism. Both conservative defenders of the family and left-
ist advocates of womens rights denounced what one critic described
as Hefner s ethic of “woman as plaything.” “The feminist movement
has raised a great deal of consciousness about the role of magazines
such as Playboy ,” wrote one columnist. 3

But the censure of the Playboy ethic in the 1980s was not confined
to indignant conservatives and angry feminists. Liberals increasingly
lined up to take their swings at Hefner as a faux liberator. In October
1985, the New Republic published “Man of the Mansion,” a sarcastic
assessment of “Hef the American Publishing Genius.” The Playboy

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MR. PLAYBOY

lifestyle never had meant much, it jeered, and now with his magazine
in disarray, his company suffering from inertia, and his “fairly empty
existence” at his Los Angeles mansion, “Hef the Letch” had revealed
his success formula: “naked young girls that can arouse the fantasies
of a whole lot of American men.” An accompanying Vint Lawrence
cartoon showed a naked, scrawny Hefner with drooping bunny ears,
pipe clenched in his teeth, surrounded by wilted flowers, empty fried-
chicken boxes, and discarded Pepsi cans. 4

An equally devastating portrait appeared in a liberal newspaper, the
Los Angeles Times. Written by the veteran journalist Bella Stumbo,
a three-part profile subtly pictured Hefner as a study in insipid, self-
involved celebrity. The series began with a description of the dishev-
eled, pajama-clad, pipe-smoking, Pepsi-sipping publisher as he sat
in his study waiting to be interviewed: “The effect was not sexy. At
57, Hefner looked like a middle-aged man who might have the flu.”
Hefner, Stumbo reported, yearned to gain respect for his historic
achievements, but her account offered little to warrant such recog-
nition. A confirmed homebody with no real hobbies beyond playing
games and watching old films, and no interest in seeing the world,
the publisher was “a man who appears to neither want nor need an
outlet for his own obvious intelligence.” When asked about people
he admired, he named movie stars, but beyond Hollywood “Hefner
was at a total loss.” While claiming that Playboy was a feminist publi-
cation, he struggled to justify the Playmate Data Sheet and confessed
that he didn’t like Playboy’s explicit photos but was forced to include
them because of readers’ tastes. Stumbo concluded with a snapshot
of the publisher at a mansion reception, complaining about the con-
servative backlash against the sexual revolution as he smooched and
nuzzled with his current twenty-one-year-old girlfriend. 5

Such attacks at least took Hefner and Playboy seriously. More dis-
tressing were the dismissals that pictured him as obsolete — the victim
of the sexual openness characteristic of modem American life. Still
fighting battles against phantom opponents, said one, “Hugh Hefner
is an anachronism in our time.” Newsweek callously noted Playboy’s
appeal to aging Baby Boomers, with ads picturing bald men with the
acclamation “Why Hair Transplantation Works.” Even the journalist
Bob Greene, an old Hefner ally, noted that twenty years ago “guys
my age used to breathlessly await Playboy’s arrival in the mail every
month. Now, in our sex-inundated society, Playboy is passe, even

THE PARTY’S OVER

349

irrelevant.” As another critic concluded, Playboy was “as relevant
today as a Nehru jacket.” 6

For many, Hefners personal lifestyle seemed to embody this
obsolescence. Increasingly, critics depicted his mansion activities
as frivolous, dissipated, or even worse, an eye-rolling throwback to
the rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s. Hefner had become “sort of
an anachronism with his pipe and smoking jacket,” sadly observed
Greene. The publishers cloistered regimen, once a source of mystery,
now “resembles nothing so much as a study in terminal depression,”
asserted Martin Amis. Even Hefners legendary love life now seemed
distasteful to many. “Give us a break,” one commentator snapped.
“A 60-year-old man running around with a 20-year-old girl — who
wants to read that.” Even Playboy insiders contributed to the dam-
age, with editor Nat Lehrman confessing, “Hefner is 60 and obviously
out of touch.” 7

The closing of many Playboy Clubs in the mid-1980s brought a
flood of obituaries. Initiated by Christie Hefner as part of her crusade
to prune unprofitable PEI projects, the shuttering of Playboy estab-
lishments in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and several other cities
seemed to underline the pastness of the Playboy ethos. The picture of
“grown women in bunny suits and grown men in pajamas began to look
more and more ridiculous,” asserted one newspaper. In the wake of
feminism, the clubs appeared as a relic of “post-war American sexism,
reflecting an age when beauty and sexuality were measured by bust size;
when sexual freedom meant male sexual freedom,” wrote the Cleveland
Plain Dealer. Even Hefner agreed that it was fruitless “to try to keep
alive something really properly perceived as a reflection of the swinging
60s,” as he told the Los Angeles Times. “Society has moved on.” 8

Despite this chorus of criticism, Playboy remained at the top of
the heap among mens magazines, but PEI’s deteriorating economic
fortunes reinforced an image of decline. Despite Christie Hefners
strenuous efforts to rid the company of dead weight, it continued to
sink lower in the water. The magazine itself, while modestly profit-
able, saw its circulation drop below four million by the mid-1980s as
merchandising, with a wide range of apparel and consumer goods,
became the leading moneymaker for the company. Its cable tele-
vision initiative floundered. The Playboy Channel, which debuted
in 1980, lost droves of subscribers as its soft-core, R-rated format
managed both to bore zealots of the sexual revolution and outrage

350

MR. PLAYBOY

Christian traditionalists, who succeeded in forcing many local stations
to drop it. By 1986, the full extent of the damage became clear. In its
annual report, PEI revealed that it had lost an astonishing $62 million,
much of it a write-off when payment for sale of the Atlantic City casino
did not materialize. Financial experts reacted with woeful analyses
of Playboys prospects. “Playboy Enterprises’ fabled rabbit is a cor-
nered creature these days,” said one. In an internal memo, Christie
Hefner tried to buck up the PEI troops by pointing to the company’s
continued strengths. While the financial figures were distressing, she
wrote, “it is our love affair with the consumer that has made Playboy
Enterprises what it is, and which will keep the company going.” 9
In the face of this torrent of bad news, Hefner and his editors
turned to the magazine. Playboy always had been the heart of the
enterprise, and revitalizing it now seemed more crucial than ever
before. In an atmosphere of malaise in the 1980s, the publisher and
his associates began searching for a new formula that would make the
publication appealing to a current, less sympathetic audience.

Longtime readers of Playboy found much that was familiar in the
1980s. The monthly Playmates continued to lead the parade of
erotic pictorials, while a new emphasis on celebrities brought reveal-
ing features on figures such as Suzanne Somers, Madonna, Vanna
White, Mariel Hemingway, Kim Basinger, LaToya Jackson, and Cindy
Crawford. One of the most popular featured actress Bo Derek, whose
dynamic, unclad appearance in the hit movie 10 made her the most
attention grabbing sex symbol of the age. National politics also pro-
vided a new avenue for eroticism, with pictorials on Bita Jenrette, wife
of Congressman John Jenrette, and “The Women of Washington.”
Hefner provided a personal touch with a 1987 retrospective on Marilyn
Monroe, whom he described as a “celestial enigma with which every
incandescent blonde has been (usually unfavorably) compared. Her
style was both timeless and matchless, her elegance ineffable.” 10
Playboy continued offering other traditional items. A collection
of distinguished short stories earned the National Magazine Award
for fiction in 1985, while a growing focus on sports brought insight-
ful profiles of boxer Mike Tyson and golfer Greg Norman and an

THE PARTY’S OVER

351

analysis of the NFLs scouting camp. Nonfiction included Cameron
Crowe s “Fast Times at Ridgemont Fligh,” while coverage of celebrity
entertainers brought the “Playboy Interview: John Lennon and Yoko
Ono” — it appeared on the newsstands the night the former Beatle
was killed in 1981 — and Bob Woodwards examination of “The Short
Life and Fast Times of John Belushi.” 11

As always, the magazine sought to stay on the cutting edge of
popular culture. Playboy ran several pieces on the 1980s mania for
health and fitness, such as “The Brawning of America” (1984) and
“The Fitness Myth” (1988). It focused on the home electronics revo-
lution, advising readers on the “home computer” invasion, the ter-
minology of (and uses for) personal computers, sophisticated new
video games, and the emergence of VCRs. In 1984, the magazine
offered bewildered readers a special “Playboy Guide to Electronic
Entertainment” that surveyed televisions, computers, and cameras,
with a warning that “with the electronic world changing so quickly,
you can use all of the friends you can get.” Around the same time it
presented centerfold Susie Scott, “our first Playmate to be a computer
whiz,” in a pictorial titled “Love at First Byte.” 12

All the while, Playboy’s politics remained staunchly liberal.
Throughout the decade, Hefner and his magazine launched continu-
ing attacks on the Reagan administration and the broader conservative
resurgence in America. It accused Reagan of striking a clandestine
deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini in order to embarrass President
Carter and ensure a Republican victory in the 1980 election. It chas-
tised the new president for encouraging white racism by cutting pro-
grams for the working poor, opposing extension of the Voting Rights
Act, giving tax breaks to segregated private schools, and emasculating
the Civil Rights Commission. It berated his “Jelly Bean Presidency,”
accusing Reagan of willful ignorance, corruption, wild defense spend-
ing, and pandering to the bigotry of the Moral Majority. In 1988 it
lauded the candidacy of Jesse Jackson while a special report the fol-
lowing year lamented a revival of white racism on campus, which it
described as sending African American students fleeing to historically
black colleges. 13

But the power of the traditional Playboy formula was fading, as
its editors well knew. “We can no longer contrast ourselves to a gray-
flannel Eisenhower society,” editor Arthur Kretchmer told the Wall
Street Journal in 1985. “Its now a lot more difficult for us to offer

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MR. PLAYBOY

something unique.” Henry Marks, a top advertising executive at the
magazine for many years, added, “The common view of Playboy is
that the publication is getting a bit stale.” These comments encapsu-
lated the challenge facing Hefner and his magazine: how to overcome
the perception that it had become anachronistic in a liberated age
and make it relevant to modem American men. 14

The renewal project faced two big obstacles. First, Playboy was
forced to navigate between advocates of the sexual revolution who
saw Hefner’s publication as quaint, and conservatives who loathed it
as a symbol of a sex-saturated culture. Observers noted the “Catch-22
situation in which Playboy management finds itself — damned if it
becomes too risque, and damned if it doesn’t.” In an interview with
Charlie Rose, Hefner admitted that sexual liberation, ironically, had
undermined Playboy and “the magazine would be much more popu-
lar in a much more repressed society.” As Newsweek concluded in its
cover story, if he was to survive “Hefner must find a home somewhere
between the anti-smut activists and the outright pornographers, if
indeed such an estate exists.” 15

Second, Playboy confronted a profound shift in mainstream
American cultural values. Early in the 1980s, it became clear that
the emotional self-absorption of the Me Decade had transformed
into the material self-interest of the Gimme Decade. In the age of
Reagan, the middle class became preoccupied with material afflu-
ence and economic security, more attuned to family values, and less
attracted to liberal social reform. “People keep saying that money
is the sex of the’80s,” observed editor Arthur Cooper of Gentlemans
Quarterly. “I suspect that’s true to a degree.” In this new atmosphere
the notorious leftist orientation of Hefner’s magazine became prob-
lematic. As George Will commented acidly, “the most dated aspect of
Playboy is its relentlessly liberal politics, which resembles the young
Marx as misread by the old Mailer.” Playboy’s leadership was not
blind to the challenge. “We feel we should be running fewer social-
action pieces now,” editor Nat Lehrman admitted in 1984. “Those
pieces don’t go down well with our current consumers.” 16

Thus Hefner and his associates came face-to-face with the con-
servative realignment in the 1980s that would transform mainstream
American society for the next several decades. They tried to reshape
Playboy to accommodate the new Zeitgeist. Kretchmer explained part
of the strategy as “moving away from a monotonous and relentless

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353

focus on sex and positioning itself as a general interest mens
magazine.” The magazine also began to cut back its political arti-
cles in favor of more service features and lifestyle pieces on fashion,
travel, and popular music. A new physical appearance accompanied
this refocusing — a switch from staples to a glued, or so-called “per-
fect binding” — that attempted to distance Playboy from other sex
magazines and make it more akin to coffee-table publications such as
Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest. Christie Hefner sketched out
the new vision for Playboy. “Leisure becomes a way of coping with
a crazy world,” she said, and noted that many Americans now saw an
annual vacation and recreational activities as necessities, and put as
much energy into leisure as into work. Moreover, since many men
were divorced or waiting longer to get married, Playboy increasingly
wanted to present more practical articles on home decorating and
home electronics, cooking, and clothes. As Christie told one inter-
viewer in 1985, readers could expect to see “a very different publica-
tion from the one my father founded.” 17

In a fashion, Playboy also sought to make peace with Reagans
America by reaching out to a much-discussed new group. Young urban
professionals, or “yuppies,” who jettisoned political radicalism and
emotional angst for vintage wines, Rolex watches, RMW sports cars,
designer clothes, and gourmet foods, became a prototype for 1980s
consumption. Declaring 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie,” Newsweek
claimed that these youthful, affluent members of the managerial and
professional classes had embraced a state of “transcendental acqui-
sition.” Playboy, if not exactly jumping on the yuppie bandwagon,
nimbly took a seat. While occasionally chastising yuppie greed, it
nonetheless attempted to reconnect with the young, prosperous,
striving entrepreneurs of the 1980s. 18

Playboy, for instance, reemphasized its connection with American
business. Critical of some of its values yet receptive to its possibilities,
the magazine began running pieces on how to t hrive in a modern
commercial milieu. “To survive in the ruthless corporate world of the
eighties, you have to know when to be a lion, and when to be a lamb,”
Michael Korda advised readers in his 1981 article “When Rusiness
Recomes a Rlood Sport.” The magazine presented a long analysis
of sixties activists who had evolved to embrace money and material-
ism in the 1980s. Jerry Rubin, who transformed himself from Yippie
radical to Wall Street stockbroker, exemplified the trend. In 1983,

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MR. PLAYBOY

Playboy launched a new finance column by the investment expert
Andrew Tobias. The following years saw a string of articles on topics
such as dressing for success in corporate America and the emergence
of corporate celebrities such as Donald Trump. By late in the decade,
Playboy was even reassessing the social and political significance of
the 1960s, balancing its traditional view of it as an era of idealis-
tic, benevolent impulses with another proclaiming that “the Age of
Aquarius was one long, bad trip by a destructive generation.” 19

This rapprochement with 1980s business even influenced some
of Playboy s erotic features. “Taking Stock of Marina” showcased
blond, beautiful Marina Verola, a stockbroker for E. F. Hutton.
“What she does like is money. She likes making it, spending a little of
it and, most of all, managing it for clients across the United States and
in five foreign countries.” Other pictorials focused on Robin Avener,
a Madison Avenue advertising executive for Ogilvy & Mather, and
Pam McCann, Linda Delgado, and Diane McDonald, a trio of lovely
entrepreneurs who “make a lot of decisions, earn a lot of money, wear
a lot of diamonds, and turn a lot of heads.” In 1989, Playboy pre-
sented “The Women of Wall Street.” A text by Louis Rukeyser, host of
PBSs Wall Street Week, accompanied the alluring photographs. After
a lengthy discussion of womens steady rise in the business world,
he noted, “In the end, let us never forget what bright women have
always known: money is sexy.” 20

Playboy also modified its creed of sexual liberation with a turn
toward traditional emotions and institutions. It began the decade with
a sentimental evocation titled “Well Take Romance.” “Romance is
the result of style, of timing, of tiny gestures,” this primer informed
readers. “If you like women, you are romantic.” Playboy even began
singing the praises of marriage. In 1983 it presented “Meet the Mrs.,”
a pictorial on Mrs. Oklahoma and Mrs. Georgia that described them
as “a pair of living testimonials to the wondrous power of marriage.”
At mid-decade, Hefner chose Kathy Shower, a thirty-three-year-old
with two daughters, as the Playmate of the Year, noting that “with a
mom like Kathy Shower — actress and Playmate of the Year — Mindy
and Melanie already have roots to make them proud.” The new
kinder, gentler Playboy appeared in full bloom in February 1989 with
Love: A Special Playboy Issue. Arriving just in time for Valentine s
Day, this remarkable number featured articles on the dynamics of
male feelings, quotations on love from some of history s great thinkers

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and writers, and various techniques for pleasing, arguing with, and
romancing the woman you love. 21

A new concern with the complexities of male-female relationships
colored the 1980s Playboy. Readers encountered traditional warn-
ings about feminine wiles, such as 1989 s “The Return of Designing
Women,” which argued that modern women once again were looking
for a husband to guarantee family, children, and economic security.
Rut now, significantly, a woman authored it. More often, Playboy
began exploring the emotional, psychological, and physiological fac-
tors influencing interactions between the sexes. In 1982, a seven-
part series titled “Man and Woman” examined research “that is
working to unravel the essentials of our nature ... a broad science
of man — of men and women — a science that is trying to find the
answers to the riddles that lie at the heart of who we are.” Playboy
increasingly sought the female perspective. In 1983 it began a new
column titled “Women” by Cynthia Heimel, author of Sex Tips for
Girls, which she described as “a lighthearted report from the female
front in the so-called sexual revolution.” “What Women Talk About
When They Talk About Men,” by Susan Squires, explained how
women dissected and judged males. This new relational empha-
sis influenced the magazine’s erotic images. In 1986, for example,
Playboy ran “Double Take,” a pictorial that featured married actors
Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith together, nude, kissing and fon-
dling in sexy poses on a Mexican beach. 22

Christie Hefner took the lead in explaining Playboy s new
approach. “Now there’s a much greater sense, and you see it in arti-
cles as well as in the columns, of talking about relationships,” she
told the public. “Not just sexual relationships — work relationships,
love relationships.” A fresh audience of “New Men,” as she termed
them, had emerged from the confluence of the sexual revolution and
the womens revolution and were more attuned to domestic life. The
way men and women “work together, live together, love together,
keep a home together, raise children together — is about as impres-
sively progressive in the 1980s as anyone could have imagined.” She
estimated their numbers at about forty million and defined them as
Playboy’ s target audience. 23

Inevitably, such concerns nudged Playboy to explore what it meant
to be a man in the 1980s. Asa Raber inaugurated a column called
“Men” that analyzed men’s approach to fatherhood, or their struggles

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to control powerful, primitive sexual drives. Articles began to appear
such as “The Modem Mans Guide to Life,” which argued that the
sensitive New Man of the 1960s and 1970s had failed because the pic-
ture of a male “sitting down and weeping about his difficulties on the
job or shedding tears of joy at the thought of a Saturday-night dinner
date is enough to make most women puke.” It argued for “an old-
fashioned guy, a reasonably thoughtful fellow” who treated women
with gentlemanly regard, kept his emotions under control, worked
hard and played hard, set priorities in his life, and stayed in reason-
able physical shape. Playboy also poked fun at such stereotypes in
“Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.” It facetiously maintained that America
had become “a nation of wimps. Pansies. Alan Alda types who cook
and clean and ‘relate’ to their wives. Phil Donahue types who are ‘sen-
sitive’ and ‘vulnerable’ and ‘understanding’ of their children.” Society,
it claimed, “can be divided into two categories of men: those who eat
quiche and those who don’t.” Real Men venerated the benchmarks
of male history: “1162, Genghis Khan develops role of Genghis Khan
for Charles Rronson,” “1762, First poker game,” “1948, Invention of
the chain saw.” 24

Playboy even modified its erotic attitude. The magazine began
to approach sex as not just the simplistic pursuit of physical plea-
sure but a matter of complex needs and desires between men and
women. In 1981, “The Age of Sexual Detente,” with essays by a male
and female author, praised the cease-fire in the war between the
sexes as both shrill feminism and die-hard chauvinism had faded.
Yet Playboy criticized the aura of brokering in modern romance, as
men and women haggled over needs and boundaries, rules and pro-
cedures, seeming “not so much to fall in love or into bed as to arrive
there, in the sense that you arrive at a solution after a long series
of calculations or consultations.” It contended that among college
students, sex seemed to be happening more frequently but in the
context of committed relationships. “It appears that today’s campus
offers a strange hybrid of the sexual permissiveness of the Sixties
and the conservatism of the Eighties.” In 1989, Playboy summed up
the sexual culture of the decade in a four-part series titled “Rurning
Desires: Sex in America.” After surveying modern sexual mores, it
concluded that despite the cooling of the sexual revolution Americans
had “reinvented pleasure.” This involved finding erotic fulfillment not
only wi t hin committed relationships but in many wondrous, prudent

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new forms: phone sex, computer sex, female-produced pornography,
and “safe sex.” 25

Any analysis of sexual activity in the 1980s, however, was clouded by
a deadly new threat. By mid-decade, AIDS had burst on the national
scene as it spread rapidly among homosexuals before leaping into the
heterosexual population. As deaths mounted, so did fear. In a series
of pieces, Playboy became perhaps the first American magazine to
disseminate accurate information and combat myths while defending
the cause of sexual liberation. Early in the crisis, the magazine con-
demned conservatives who maintained that this disease was a revenge
from God or Nature for homosexuality and heterosexual promiscuity.
By 1986, the magazine focused on publicizing scientific facts about
the virus and urging preventative measures: do not share needles,
avoid anal intercourse and prostitutes, use condoms. It also insisted
that Hefner’s message of “fearlessly examining society’s inhibitions
and. . . . trying to raise the curtain on sexual enlightenment” was
more relevant than ever. By late in the decade, however, Playboy had
despaired, conceding that the disease had dramatically chilled enthu-
siasm for sex among young, single, heterosexual men and women
throughout the country. AIDS, in many ways, seemed to symbolize
the frustrating new milieu facing Hefner’s magazine. 26

The struggle to reposition Playboy and recapture cultural rel-
evance in the 1980s proved to be a long and frustrating task. The
magazine’s founder, when he wearied of struggling with the woes of
his enterprise, turned eagerly to the pursuit of romance and sexual
adventure. He had always found sanctuary in his private fantasies,
but the haven of female companionship provided no refuge from the
storm in this dark decade. If anything, Mr. Playboy’s romantic life
proved even more dismaying.

Ill

By 1981, Hefner’s relationship with Sondra Theodore had run its
course. After five years together, she had become increasingly dis-
traught over the publisher’s sexual dalliances, while he had grown
impatient with her possessiveness and emotional fragility. An inten-
sifying cycle of breakups and reconciliation made it clear that the
romance had lost its heart. Hefner’s roving eye turned elsewhere.

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It soon focused on Shannon Tweed, a tall, gorgeous blonde from
Toronto. Twice rejected as a potential Playmate, she had entered
Playboy through a spot on a Toronto television show that made con-
testants’ dreams come true. It put her in touch with the organiza-
tion, and she went on to become Miss November 1981, and then
Playmate of the Year. She also became Hefners new girlfriend. They
had met at the mansion during her shoot and became romantically
involved at the Midsummer’s Night Dream Party in August 1981.
Soon they were steady companions. 27

Tweed had been born in 1957 to a large family of mink ranchers
in Newfoundland. After moving to Saskatchewan following a cata-
strophic car wreck that left her father incapacitated, she dropped out
of high school and worked in a variety of coffee shops, restaurants,
hotels, department stores, and nightclubs in Ottawa. She won the
Miss Ottawa beauty pageant in 1978, competed for Miss Canada, and
launched a successful modeling career in Toronto. Eventually, she
determined to go to Los Angeles to pursue a career in movies and
television, and saw Playboy as her ticket. 28

Tweed made no secret of her professional ambitions. “I think I can
make it in the world of entertainment and I’m going to give it my best
shot,” she told her hometown newspaper after becoming a Playmate.
She spoke frankly about using Playboy to advance her prospects, and
a relationship with Hefner fit comfortably within this larger plan.
At their first Christmas together, the independent young woman
gave him a romantic card that said, “I belong to you, too, darling,”
but carefully crossed out the printed word “belong” and hand-wrote
in its place, “well, almost.” “Going with Hef is a career move,” she
informed an interviewer. The publisher suffered no illusions, telling
People, “I find the way she dropped the net over me enchanting.” As a
Hefner friend described, when Tweed arrived at the mansion “loving
the party life and wearing the ‘Absolutely NO domesticity Allowed
in My Presence’ T-shirt stretched over her perfectly shaped breasts,
it was too much for Hef to resist.” 29

Then Hefner and Tweed fell in love. The publisher felt a genu-
ine spark of affection and within a few months was describing her
publicly as “the love of my life.” He showered her with so many
expensive gifts that a friend, after seeing his lavish Christmas list,
memorized it and entertained mansion friends with a singing rendi-
tion set to “A Partridge in a Pear Tree.” Astonishingly, Hefner even

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359

uttered the dreaded “M word,” telling an old Chicago friend that his
Canadian girlfriend was “the first woman I have seriously considered
marrying.” 30

Tweeds unabashed careerism seemed to melt in the face of a grow-
ing affection for her older suitor. “I can’t rely on myself for every-
thing. I need a love in my life,” she began to say. The couple tried to
maintain a monogamous relationship, and Tweed talked publicly of
marriage. But she realized the obstacle facing her. “Marriage is not
natural for Hef. It’s natural for me to think in those terms since it’s
the first time I’ve known it’s right,” she told People. “But it’s going to
take him longer since he’s been through it before.” In an interview
with the London Mirror, she revealed Hefner’s promise that “if we
were in love in five years’ time and I wanted to have a child, he would
marry me.” 31

But soon the genuine love in the relationship began to dissolve
as complications set in. Tweed’s rapidly advancing career provided
the initial difficulty. She became host for the new Playboy Channel’s
magazine show Playboy on the Scene, and the first Video Playmate.
A regular role on the hit CBS evening soap opera Falcon Crest followed,
along with two movie parts. Her hectic work schedule demanded fre-
quent absences, and Hefner bridled. When he complained, Tweed
replied, “I want to work, I have to work. I can’t just sit around being
the hostess of the Playboy Mansion. It’s not enough for me.” During
one of the big mansion parties, Falcon Crest required her to be on
location, and after much sparring over her schedule Hefner finally
hired a private plane to fly her directly to the location so she could
attend the party. “It was the beginning of the end for Hef and me,”
she commented later. “What he didn’t realize was that our schedules
would clash more than once.” 32

Tweed’s gradual disenchantment with her role as mistress of the
Playboy Mansion widened the split. As the novelty wore off, she felt rest-
less, unproductive, and restricted in ways that gnawed at her vaunted
independence . The daily round of game playing bored her silly and she
grumbled that Hefner’s compulsion had made her a “Pacman widow.”
He grew disturbed by two by-products of her boisterous lifestyle:
drugs and infidelities. Hefner claimed that “I couldn’t get her to stop
using cocaine,” and her sexual peccadilloes infuriated him. He discov-
ered that she was having an affair with a movie costar in early 1983, for
instance, and confronted her on the morning of a mansion luncheon

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MR. PLAYBOY

for television critics. The couple spent an anguished day hiding their
feelings behind fake smiles as they escorted the visitors around the
mansion grounds and gave interviews. 33

The relationship crumbled in spring 1983. Invited by Berry Gordy
to attend Motowns Twenty-fifth Anniversary Show at the end of
March, the couple spent much of the evening bickering and left early.
A few weeks later, Tweed gave Hefner a cartoon showing a man and a
woman in a boxing ring punching with heart-shaped gloves. “It is an
all-too-accurate portrayal of the frequently rocky romance,” Hefner
commented. With both participants increasingly dissatisfied, they
decided to split up and parted on an amicable note 34

Hefner, typically, did not tarry. Within two weeks he had become
involved with another Canadian, this one a sultry brunette who had
come to the mansion for a Playmate test shoot. Carrie Lee Carmichael -
soon shortened to Carrie Leigh for professional purposes — had set
her sights on the publisher, according to Marilyn Grabowski, Playboy’s
photo editor. On her Playmate Data Sheet, she identified him as the
man she most admired because he “started with nothing and built an
empire on what he believed.” When Hefner first saw the nineteen-
year-old beauty, it was “one of those things when you look across the
room and something happens,” he told Rolling Stone. “We fell for
each other.” Leigh, who had been modeling since age fourteen, spent
the night with Hefner several days later, and within a short time she
moved in and became the mistress of the mansion. 35

Leigh quickly established herself in Hefners world. Young, auda-
cious, and funny, she appeared as a breath of fresh air. She became
friends with a number of Playmates from this period and hosted
slumber parties full of youthful female hijinks and girl talk. Leigh
also became a regular player — and only female — in Hefner s weekly
card games, and the others gave her a framed poster of the queen
of spades with a caption: “Carrie Is My Name — Gin Rummy Is My
Game.” Taking quickly to the good life, she followed a routine of
sleeping until noon followed by bubble baths, facials, walks around
the grounds, and workouts in the exercise room. She served as hostess
for weekly parties and film watching, drawing attention with a parade
of gaudy, highly revealing outfits that soon began to fill her closets,
courtesy of a generous weekly allowance from Hefner. According to
the photographer Alison Reynolds, Leigh used outlandish clothes
to shock people because “she was more or less an exhibitionist, and

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I think that’s what made her a good model.” She also bluntly spoke
her mind. “I’m really honest and straightforward about a lot of things,
which sometimes gets me into trouble,” she told a reporter. But the
couple shared a mutual infatuation. In a 1984 interview with the Los
Angeles Times, she gushed, “Hef is one of the sweetest, most consid-
erate men in the world!” The publisher smiled and kissed her, adding,
“There’s nothing sweeter in life than being in love.” 36

More disturbing qualities soon appeared. Leigh’s attention-seeking
became more extreme and provocative, as she made a show of walking
about the mansion grounds with a snake wrapped around her neck.
On one notable occasion she broke up a meeting of Playboy execu-
tives on the back patio by parading through the yard naked except
for a pair of high heels and a gold chain around her waist. She also
established a reputation as a party animal whose pleasure-seeking,
according to Hefner and many mansion regulars, produced legend-
ary bouts of drinking and recreational drug use. “She out-caroused
the champion carouser of all time: Hef,” reported Anne Stewart. She
also managed to raise eyebrows at the mansion — no mean feat — with
a voracious sexual appetite. Stories of her dalliances with men and
women alike soon began making the rounds among the mansion
circle and Leigh seemed to delight in her reputation, telling Playboy,
“I think sometimes I like it even more than he does. I like waking him
in the middle of the night. ‘Hef!’ In the morning: ‘Hef!’ Sometimes,
I even try to get him out of his meetings.” Leigh’s emotional volatility
became conspicuous. “There were early signs of instability. She got
drunk one night and ran down the hall naked, threatening to throw
herself off the balcony,” reported Lisa Loving. Marilyn Grabowski
noted that Leigh would “act crazy and create a scene just to get Hef’s
attention.” Hefner described a 1985 incident in which his girlfriend
left for Toronto for “three delirious weeks of drinking, drugs, and
sexual excess.” In his words, she phoned “from the bathroom of her
Toronto hotel suite because her partners from the night before were
still asleep in the bedroom. . . . She wanted to come home.” 37

Leigh desperately sought celebrity. “Basically, I’m insecure and
need attention. I want to be a superstar,” she confessed to a Los
Angeles newspaper. When Jessica Hahn moved into the mansion for
several months after toppling Jim Bakker in the PTL Club sex scandal,
Leigh declared, “I wish I had the same [publicity] happen to me.” She
pleaded with Hefner to put her in Playboy and he finally arranged a

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MR. PLAYBOY

1986 cover story titled “The First Lady of the Playboy Mansion.”
She then sought to parlay the publicity into an acting career with a
bit of instruction and an impatient wait to be discovered. According
to the film director Richard Brooks, however, Leigh’s “delusions . . .
came to nothing. She did plenty of over-acting around the mansion,
but that was about it.” Her search for fame also produced much
cosmetic surgery. She underwent numerous procedures — several
nose operations, cheek implants, breast enhancement, facial peel,
lip enhancement — in a quest for physical perfection. This produced
a brittle beauty that — in combination with her temperamental
personality — earned her a special moniker among regulars and staff
at the mansion: Scary Leigh. 38

Hefner and Leigh’s relationship became an emotional yo-yo with
wild swings between passion and contention, romantic fulfillment and
emotional drain. Her outlandish behavior produced frequent quarrels,
usually followed by overwrought apologies such as this one: “I am very
sorry for being unkind tonight. You don’t deserve that kind of treat-
ment. You have made me happier than I ever thought possible and
behaving the way I did is no way to show my gratitude. I love you and
I promise that things are just going to get nicer between us. Love for-
ever, Carrie.” Hefner believed that alcohol roused darker impulses. In
the summer of 1985, after a heavy bout of drinking, she wrote him a
disjointed note that hinted of suicide. “Thank you, Hef. I would die for
you . . . love is the key to my life and if I can’t fulfill that desire and goal
then I have nothing to live for,” she wrote. “Love is the most important
thing in life. If I can’t have that then I have no reason for existence and
neither do you.” In September 1986, Leigh created a public stir when
she insisted on wearing — over Hefner’s objections — an extremely
revealing dress to a fund-raiser for Democratic candidates held at
Barbra Streisand’s home. Said one published account, it was “as tight
as the casing on a Dodger hot dog. The front of this creation consists
of two pieces of cloth crisscrossed over her breasts; she looks like a
railroad crossing guard in a Russ Meyer movie.” According to Hefner,
Leigh fled the event after the couple squabbled, lost a very expensive
diamond ring he had given her as a gift, and ended up in bed at a
friend’s apartment. 39

Leigh’s emotional frailty produced endless entreaties, or demands,
for reassurances from her boyfriend. Several times a day, she would
ask Hefner, “Do you love me? Am I beautiful?” In her Playboy cover

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363

story, she admitted to “insecurities and changes in mood. Hef is
the first man I’ve ever known who can handle me no matter what
mood I’m in.” For the publisher, this meant a stream of verbal and
financial avowals, sweet talk and credit cards, pet names and furs,
endearments and jewels. Hefner gave Leigh daily gifts, which he
called “Dr. Bunny” presents, and she would accept or reject them
as she wished. Executive assistant Mary O’Connor recorded some of
these episodes in her diary. “Hef walked up while Carrie was saying
the diamonds on her necklace were lonesome. . . . Hef came down,
Carrie depressed — Dr. Bunny took presents, Carrie didn’t like them,
but she may consider keeping the pants and sweater. . . . Hef took
diamonds for Carrie to see. She preferred the baguette. Hef finally
selected a stone from Marvin Hime — $18,000.” In addition, Hefner
gave Leigh a $5,000 a month clothing allowance, several fur coats,
a five-carat diamond friendship ring, and a yearly birthday gift that
matched her age in thousands of dollars — $22,000 on her twenty-
second birthday and so on for the next several years. 40

The relationship took on a peculiar sexual dynamic. Hefner,
increasingly weary of a group-sex scene he now described as “point-
less and pathetic” and interested in settling down, became genuinely
monogamous. As Leigh told Newsweek in 1986, “He doesn’t fool
around now — I’d kill him. I don’t know how the hell he pulled it off
with his other girlfriends.” Leigh, however, according to many wit-
nesses, pursued sex in a variety of venues. Several Playmates reported
that she made advances to them — “I know she was into girls a little
bit,” said one — while Marilyn Grabowski recounted how she would
send her love notes and call in the middle of the night. Hefner gained
knowledge of several sexual affairs Leigh had with men. In fact, when
Leigh got pregnant and had an abortion, the publisher doubted that
the child was his. “I’m a responsible and careful guy,” he explained.
“It’s one of the reasons I’ve never had any paternity suits.” 41

Hefner’s friends grew increasingly appalled at Leigh’s behavior
and his toleration of it. “It was painful to watch. . . . Here he was
letting himself be humiliated, even letting her rub his face in affairs
with other people,” said John Dante. Cis Bundle described the situ-
ation as “toxic” while Dick Stewart denounced her as “a nut case.”
Richard Brooks saw Leigh as a “cuckoo girl” who “mixed a posture
of humility with steel claws.” Some even confronted Hefner. Both of
his children told him they disapproved of Leigh, and Keith Hefner

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MR. PLAYBOY

pleaded with his brother to get rid of the young woman, whom he
described as “a terrible person who was making faces and jokes about
him behind his back and embarrassing him in public.” Lisa Loving,
an outspoken Hefner assistant, told him frankly that everyone at the
mansion was “embarrassed by your association with her. . . . You are
degrading yourself beyond belief.” Many concluded that the young
Canadian was taking her wealthy, older boyfriend for a financial ride.
According to Anne Stewart, she once asked Leigh if she was taking
acting lessons and the young woman replied that she didn’t need
them. When Stewart inquired why not, Leigh responded, “If I can
make Hef believe I love him, I’m the greatest actress in the world.”
Leigh seemed unconcerned about her gold-digger image, telling a
Newsweek reporter who admired her diamond “friendship ring” from
Hefner, “if we got engaged it would have to be 10 more carats.” 42

But Hefner insisted on viewing Leigh in gauzy soft focus as a lead-
ing lady — part femme fatale and part ingenue — in the movie of his
life. He found her sexually exciting, unconventional, and even fun. In
interviews, he described their relationship as “especially fulfilling,”
characterized the period as “one of the best times of my life,” and
opined that “life is deadly dull when a relationship becomes routine
and boring. Carrie Leigh was never boring.” When his friends put
her down, he angrily rushed to her defense. “How can they say this
dynamite-looking woman with this incredible taste in clothes and a
flair for fashion, willing to take steps beyond the boundaries, how can
they say that she’s a source of embarrassment? She is an incredible
addition,” he countered. 43

Yet Hefner understood all too well Leigh’s flighty mental state.
She drove him to distraction with her antics, but her emotional vul-
nerability powerfully aroused his sympathy. Among confidants, he
spoke of her as his “crippled bird” and mused that he could somehow
nurture this lost soul to a state of stability and self-worth. The pathos
in Leigh’s insatiable hunger for affection and praise caused him to
see her as emotionally destitute rather than manipulative. Hefner’s
empathy even led him to understand her sexual indiscretions. “I’ve
never known anybody like her, who used seduction with both guys
and girls as a way of reaffirming that she is desirable or worthy,” he
said years later. Mary O’Connor, who knew her boss well, suspected
another factor at work. She saw the ghost of Bobbie Arnstein hover-
ing in the background, causing Hefner to purge some guilt by doing

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365

“those things that I think he feels he should have done more of with
Bobbie.” 44

Indeed, Leigh ultimately cut a poignant, rather than a malicious,
figure as she cavorted about the mansion craving attention. Scarcely
educated, emotionally immature, and thrown into a demanding
social whirl, this young woman simply was ill-equipped for her role
in Hefners life. She reached for the tools at hand — exhibitionism
and shock tactics — to try and gain security in a pressurized environ-
ment. As Chuck McCann, an old Hefner friend, put it, Leigh “really
didn’t have a fix on life yet. She didn’t know what she wanted. . . .
With someone like Carrie, coming into a person’s life like Hef — it’s
too much, too soon.” Playmate Julie McCullough, a friend of Leigh’s,
attributed her theatrics to confusion about life goals and a sense of
place: “She was like a princess in a big house with not a lot to do.” 45

But by the fall of 1987 Leigh’s outrageous behavior had worn down
even Hefner. “She just got more and more hysterical, making scenes
and throwing tantrums, smashing things, running nude around the
house — anything to get a rise out of him,” reportevd John Dante. In
late September a final straw came when an agitated Leigh, in front of
a group of guests, threw an expensive Gallo statue off the balcony of
the mansion’s great hall, smashing it to bits on the marble floor below.
She then fled the premises and disappeared with a female friend for
five days. Several weeks later, Leigh procured a key to the safe in
Hefner’s room and took a sex tape of him and several women that
had been made in the 1970s. Telling close friend Jessica Hahn, “I’m
going to expose him,” she hid the tape in Hahn’s mansion bedroom.
But Hahn, grateful to Hefner for taking her in after the PTL scandal,
returned the tape to him and explained what his girlfriend was plan-
ning. Leigh, it turned out, already had met with palimony attorney
Marvin Mitchelson and the purloined tape seems to have been part
of a ruse to force Hefner into a large monetary settlement. A fum-
ing Hefner noted that after this “attempted shake-down . . . Carrie
feels betrayed by Jessica and Hef feels betrayed by Carrie. Merry
Christmas, everyone!” 46

The unbearable tension finally snapped in January 1988 when
Leigh left with two girlfriends for a trip to New York City. She phoned
to say that she would not be returning to the mansion. Hefner was
both hurt and relieved. A short time later, Leigh and Mitchelson held
a press conference announcing the filing of a palimony suit against

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MR. PLAYBOY

Hefner in the amount of $35 million. After the publisher denounced
it as a “publicity stunt” and filed a countersuit, Leigh reacted with
typical unpredictability — she suddenly dropped her legal action to
marry an antiques dealer she had met in New York. A chagrined
Hefner noted that Leigh had loved the 1987 movie Black Widow, a
thriller about a woman who married several wealthy men and then
murdered them for their money. “It didn’t occur to me that Carrie
might be viewing it as a training film,” he said ruefully. 47

So the publisher’s personal life, much like the financial state of
his company, fell on hard times in the 1980s. Buffeted by Playboy’s
growing public problems, a “damaged” Hefner, as he described him-
self, yearned for genuine amour. Instead, he fell into a tumultuous
psychodrama with Carrie Leigh. “I was trying to settle down; I just
picked the wrong girl,” he said later. But his problems were only
beginning. The atmosphere grew even darker as a gathering political
storm blew Hefner back into the public limelight and threatened to
destroy him. 48

Strange Bedfellows

I n the mid-1980s, a political assault gathered force and challenged
everything that Hugh Hefner and Playboy stood for. An alliance
of strange ideological bedfellows, it aimed to exterminate the pub-
lisher, his magazine, and his values. In the front ranks stood newly
empowered conservatives of the Reagan administration, but close
behind them pressed supporting squadrons of radical feminists. On
most issues these two groups clashed, but they overlooked differ-
ences to mount a common crusade against what they saw as the cor-
rupting influence of degrading erotic images, promiscuous sexuality,
and the exploitation of women. Figures as diverse as the Reverend
Jerry Falwell and the lesbian activist Andrea Dworkin joined forces
and tried to put Hefner out of business. In a bizarre final chapter of
this political saga, Peter Rogdanovich, Dorothy Stratten s distraught
boyfriend, emerged from mourning to join the assault.

As this political attack built up steam, Hefner mounted a desperate
defense. Throwing himself into the fight, he became obsessed with
defending his reputation, his life’s work, and his principles. The stress
took a severe personal toll on the publisher, and in an ultimate symbol
of the dark period of the 1980s, his health finally broke down.

367

368

MR. PLAYBOY

On May 20, 1985, Attorney General Edwin Meese announced the
formation of a special federal panel to study pornography. While a
1970 presidential commission had concluded that there was no link
between sexual material and sexual crime or delinquency, Meese
insisted that a new study was needed. Pornography had become more
pervasive and more violent, he charged. “We no longer must go out
of the way to find pornographic materials. With the advent of cable
television and video recorders, pornography now is available at home
to almost anyone, regardless of age, at the mere touch of a button.” 1

The eleven-person Meese Commission, as it quickly became
known, included three liberals: Judith Becker of Columbia University,
Park Dietz of the University of Virginia, and Ellen Levine of Womens
Day. But conservatives dominated the panel. They included several
Bepublican politicos and several antipornography advocates, such
as James C. Dobson, religious traditionalist and popular radio-show
host of Focus on the Family, the Reverend Bruce Ritter, director of
a home for runaways who blamed the pornography industry for their
plight, and a law professor from the University of Michigan, Frederick
Schauer, who had argued that visual pornography was not speech and
therefore not subject to First Amendment protection. The chairman
was Henry E. Hudson, prosecuting attorney for Arlington County,
Virginia, who had successfully banished most pornography from this
suburban Washington, D.C., area. The panel was enjoined to deter-
mine the nature of pornography’s impact on American life, and to
make recommendations to the Justice Department about containing
its spread. 2

The political clout of the Reagan administration clearly lay behind
this initiative. Religious conservatives and the Moral Majority com-
prised a powerful part of the new Republican majority, and the
president sympathized with their horrified view of a sex-saturated
moral decline in America. He had made several speeches denounc-
ing pornography as “a form of pollution” and pledged to clean up
these “hazardous-waste sites.” Addressing the National Association
of Evangelicals in March 1984, Reagan argued that in the 1960s and
1970s America seemed “to lose her religious and moral bearings, to
forget that faith and values are what made us good and great.” This
decline was reflected not only in rampant drug use, legalized abortion,

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369

and the banning of prayer from schools, but also in pornography and
promiscuity. Sexual images had become available everywhere, he
contended. “Liberal attitudes viewed promiscuity as acceptable, even
stylish. Indeed, the word itself was replaced by a new term, ‘sexually
active.’” But now, Reagan concluded, the American people had
decided to “put a stop to that long decline” and seek moral renewal.
Soon after, the president announced specific plans: the convening
of a special commission because “we consider pornography to be a
public problem.” 3

Background skirmishing between Hefner and religious fun-
damentalists had preceded this declaration of war. In 1982, the
Reverend Donald Wildmon announced that his National Federation
for Decency would bestow a “Pomographer of the Month” award to
corporations that advertised in Playboy and publish their CEO’s name
and company phone number. Wildmon also orchestrated demonstra-
tions against including the Playboy Channel on local cable channels
and selling the magazine in neighborhood stores. Jerry Falwell also
spoke out, calling for Hefner’s religious conversion. “Wouldn’t it
be wonderful,” he said, “if Hugh Hefner got saved and shut down
Playboy Enterprises and became a spokesman for Jesus Christ? He
could be another Saul.” 4

Then in 1984 the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention funded a controversial study that sought
to link Playboy and the sexual abuse of children. It awarded a grant
for $743,000 to Judith Reisman for a content analysis of cartoons
in men’s magazines with regard to the sexual portrayal of children.
This former producer and writer for the Captain Kangaroo show had
made a stir when she termed Hefner and other publishers of male
magazines as “sexual fascists . . . who are every bit as dangerous as
Hitler.” In 1983, she charged that the sex investigator Alfred J. Kinsey
had engaged in “vicious genital torture” of children and had sex with
over eight hundred minors during the course of his research. Now she
analyzed hundreds of images in Playboy , Penthouse , and Hustler, and
concluded that they portrayed children sexually to varying degrees,
implying a connection to child abuse. The charges were absurdly false
regarding Playboy, which never depicted children in sexual situa-
tions, and experts almost unanimously dismissed Reisman’s study as
having little social science value. But her effort illustrated the larger
ideological conflict that was brewing. 5

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MR. PLAYBOY

In reply, Playboy taunted its fundamentalist oppressors during the
early 1980s. In 1982 s “Holy Terror,” the authors described a new
form of terrorism: “Americas fundamentalist right, a hybrid of reli-
gious and political absolutism led by a small group of preachers and
political strategists, has begun to use religion and all that Americans
hold sacred to seize power across a broad spectrum of our lives.”
A Playboy editorial skewered the Reagan administrations “porn
paranoia” with the Reisman grant, noting her lackluster credentials,
and exposing the close ties between Office of Juvenile Justice appoin-
tees and Jerry Falwell, anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schlafly, and the
Reverend Pat Robertson. Playboy also helped form People for
the American Way, an advocacy group soon running anticensorship
ads in newspapers and magazines around the country. 6

Rut the forces of fundamentalism in the Reagan administration
gained an unlikely ally from the other end of the political spectrum.
Ry the early 1980s, radical feminists had launched their own assault
on pornography, claiming that sexually explicit material denigrated
women and led to acts of sexual violence. In the words of the femi-
nist writer Robin Morgan, “Pornography is the theory and rape is
the practice.” Susan Rrownmiller, author of Against Our Will , spoke
similarly. “Pornography is propaganda against women, and propa-
ganda is a very powerful spur to action — think of the anti-Semitic
propaganda in Hitler’s Germany,” she declared in Harper’s. Fired
by such convictions, antipom feminists protested the sale of sexual
material in cities throughout the United States and formed pressure
groups such as Women Against Pornography and Women Against
Violence in Pornography and Media. Ry 1984, they were prepared
to join cultural conservatives in a war on smut, including Hefner and
Playboy. 7

The feminist antiporn crusade found a focal point in the endeavors
of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. The former, an urbane
law professor from the University of Michigan and the University of
Chicago, and the latter, a lesbian activist and radical writer habitually
dressed in overalls and work shirts, formed a partnership urging legal
action to restrict pornography. They took a new constitutional tack
in doing so, defining pornography as a violation of the civil rights of
women. In the same way that racist speech was linked to racism, they
argued, pornography was linked to sex discrimination against women.

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371

“Pornography creates attitudes that keep women second-class
citizens,” Dworkin contended. MacKinnon defined pornography as
“an actual practice of subordinating women. Its a technologically
sophisticated form of trafficking in women.” These activists served
as consultants for the city councils of Minneapolis and Indianapolis,
drafting ordinances that allowed women who were injured through
pornography to sue for damages. They were found to be unconsti-
tutional, and neither ordinance went into effect, but a larger target
still remained: the godfather of the sexual revolution in America. As
Dworkin declared, “Playboy, both in text and pictures, promotes
rape. Its cartoons promote both rape and sexual abuse.” 8

Hefner and Playboy confronted their feminist foes. Two 1980 arti-
cles, “Women at War” and “Women Against Sex,” portrayed antiporn
feminists as angry fanatics who sought to abolish First Amendment
rights and censor anyone who disagreed with their assessment of
sexual materials impact on women. They noted Marcia Womongold,
a Boston militant who fired a rifle bullet through the window of a
Harvard bookstore because it sold copies of Playboy, Oui, and
Penthouse. They pointed out that antipom feminists denounced sex-
ual images in newspaper ads, fashion magazines such as Vogue, and
movies and television. They accused Women Against Pornography of
collapsing all distinctions between sadistic images of physical harm to
women and fashion photos or Playmate pictorials. In 1981, Christie
Hefner reviewed one of the key texts of antipom feminism, Take Back
the Night: Women on Pornography, edited by Laura Lederer, and
dismissed it for failing “to recognize the subtleties and complexities
of sexuality, pornography, and violence, coupled with its underlying
theme that men have a propensity to rape and beat women.” James
Petersen critiqued these crusaders as “Big Sister” agents of thought
control right out of Orwell’s police state with their own brand of new-
speak: “Sex is Bape. Desire is Degradation. The Personalis Political. The
Public is Private. Pleasure is Oppression. Pom is Thought Crime.” 9
A special controversy erupted in 1980 with the publication of
Ordeal: An Autobiography, by Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep
Throat, the hit porn movie from the 1970s. She now claimed that
she had been violently intimidated by her husband/manager, Chuck
Traynor, and claimed that Hefner had exploited her during a several-
day visit to the mansion. Lovelace maintained that Traynor and Hefner

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MR. PLAYBOY

had organized an “orgy night” of group sex with Bunnies, Playmates,
and hookers, and that Traynor had pushed her into a public sexual
act with a young woman before forcing her to have sex with Hefner.
Most luridly, she contended that Traynor set up a private scene for
Hefner to observe her having sex with a dog, although she claimed
to have feigned the act . 10

Hefner was caught up in the furor of headlines and reviews. He
heatedly denied the charges as pure fiction, contending that his rela-
tionship with Lovelace “was based on friendship, not sex” and that he
had no knowledge of any intimidation. He characterized her claims
as a sensational publicity stunt to boost sales. “The suggestion that
she did not enjoy her life at this period is preposterous. She car-
ried on in the same manner after she left Traynor. I saw no change
in personality, dress, what have you,” he contended. But antiporn
feminists embraced Lovelace. In her introduction to a second book
by the actress titled Out of Bondage, Gloria Steinem pictured her
as a victim of smut and lashed out at “Hugh Hefner and his Playboy
Mansion,” contending that the key issue with pornography was “free
will.” In her words, “pornography is to women of all groups what Nazi
literature is to Jews and Ku Klux Klan literature is to Blacks .” 11

Against this backdrop, the Meese Commission emerged as a
fundamentalist-feminist partnership determined to create legal restric-
tions against the distribution, sale, and consumption of pornographic
materials. “In an unusual alliance, feminists have joined conservative
intellectuals to make a case for a ban,” wrote the New York Times.
Newsweek agreed that “radical feminists . . . joined by right-wing
fundamentalists” comprised the new “shock troops” assaulting the
pornography industry. Dworkin had no qualms about her new allies.
“When women get raped they’re not asked first if they’re Democrats
or Republicans,” she declared. The liberal toleration of pornography
demonstrated “clearly how the left has betrayed women — they are
entirely corrupt .” 12

This political alliance of strange bedfellows made Playboy, the
most prominent symbol of sexual liberation and imagery in postwar
America, a leading target. Over the previous thirty years, Hefner had
suffered periodic attacks from foes outraged by his advocacy of rec-
reational sex and unconventional morality. But never before had the
opposition found such powerful political expression. Clearly, he was
in trouble.

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373

The Meese Commission, armed with a budget of only $500,000
and facing a twelve-month deadline, quickly convened a series of
hearings around the country. In the fall of 1985 and early 1986 they
heard some three hundred hours of testimony from over two hundred
witnesses, close to 80 percent of whom were critics of pornography.
They convened publicly in six cities to focus on preordained topics:
Washington (general), Chicago (law enforcement), Houston (social
science), Los Angeles (production and distribution), Miami (child
pornography), and New York (organized crime). The panel heard
graphic testimony from a variety of interested parties concerning por-
nography: vice cops and victims, prosecutors and producers, born-
again Christians and feminist activists, the National Federation for
Decency and the FBI, sober researchers and thundering preachers.
The panelists watched dozens of movies and videos, saw countless
slide shows put together by witnesses, perused innumerable maga-
zines, and heard taped dial-a-pom encounters. They took field trips to
sex shops (“Mr. Peepers” in Houston) and sex districts (Times Square
in New York), surveyed the most extreme kinds of sexual behavior
and fetishes, and discovered during a session on the world of “rubber
goods” (dildos and dolls) that the Houston vice squad had confis-
cated and was storing some twenty-seven thousand items. At times
the commission, according to Time , seemed to be on a “surrealist
mystery tour of sexual perversity, peeping at the most recondite forms
of sexual behavior known — though mostly unknown — to society.” 13
Playboy emerged as a key target. In Chicago, company attorney
Burt Joseph reminded the commission that the magazine had never
“at any time, in any jurisdiction been found to be obscene in a court
of law.” But the commission quickly erased any positive impres-
sions. In Miami, a middle-aged man carrying a Bible testified that
first seeing an issue of Playboy at age twelve had sent him down
the path to sexual perversion and drug abuse. In Los Angeles, Miki
Garcia, a former Playmate, caused a sensation when she denounced
Hefner, his organization, and his lifestyle. Miss January 1973, and
later director of Playmate Promotions, she accused the Playboy pub-
lisher of encouraging Playmates to use illegal drugs, coercing them
into orgies, and exploiting women for sexual pleasure, all of which
were covered up because of Hefner s influence with the Los Angeles

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MR. PLAYBOY

Police Department. She claimed that some Playmates became part of
a call-girl ring while others became victims of rape, serial abortions,
venereal disease, and unwanted cosmetic surgery. “I want the public
to recognize that Playboy magazine is not the coffee table literature
that Hugh Hefner says it is, but rather a pornographic magazine,”
she declared. Garcia added the dramatic claim that her testimony
would “put my life and those of my family’s in danger.” Newspapers
leaped on her lurid accusations, writing that “rape, attempted suicide,
and violent crime were part of the Playboy lifestyle.” 14

Playboy angrily denied all of Garcias charges. Spokesmen pointed
out that she had never made a single complaint about improper or
illegal activity during her employment. Instead, she had written in
a memo, “It may sound corny, but Playboy has been a wonderful
influence on my life. I respect and admire Mr. Hefner and what he
stands for.” They noted that Garcia had been trying, unsuccessfully,
to peddle a book manuscript about her Playboy days and accused her
of using the commission testimony to prompt interest in the stalled
project. 15

Brenda MacKillop, a born-again Bunny who had worked at the
Los Angeles Playboy Club from 1973 to 1976 and frequented the Play-
boy Mansion, also testified. Now a Christian, pastors wife, and anti-
porn activist, she related that her Playboy lifestyle had brought on
depression and near-suicide. “I implore the Attorney General’s com-
mission to see the connection between sexual promiscuity, venereal
disease, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, sexual abuse of children,
suicide, drug abuse, rape, and prostitution to pornography,” MacKillop
stated. She also appeared at antipornography protests around the
country, characterizing Playboy as “filth,” and even sent a letter and
a Bible to Hefner. “What is one to say to someone who has publicly
vilified me in such a totally distorted and bizarre fashion in front of
the Meese Commission, on television, and in various published inter-
views?” he replied sharply. “I have never treated you with anything
but kindness. . . . You claim to be a good Christian, but the form of
Christianity that you practice seems to be the equivalent of placing a
burning cross on someone’s front lawn.” 16

Early in 1986, the Meese Commission directly attacked Hefner’s
operation. Its executive director, Alan E. Sears, a fervent anti-
obscenity prosecutor from the U.S. Attorney’s office in western
Kentucky, sent letters to twenty-three retailers saying that they

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375

had been accused of involvement in the sale or distribution of
pornography. The commission asked for a response to the allegation
by March 3, and stated that “failure to respond will necessarily be
accepted as an indication of no objection.” The list of companies,
provided by the Reverend Wildmon, included Coca-Cola (it owned
Columbia Pictures), Time, Inc. (it presented R-rated movies on HRO
and Cinemax), and Vogue (for running Calvin Klein’s “Obsession”
fragrance ads). This ominous missive clearly threatened a flood of
adverse publicity from the government if the companies did not cease
selling materials that Wildmon considered pornographic. Within
weeks, the pressure tactic bore fruit. 17

The parent company of the 7-Eleven convenience store chain, the
Southland Corporation, announced in April that its seventy-five hun-
dred outlets and franchises would stop selling Playboy, Penthouse,
and Forum. Other retailers quickly followed suit. Ry summer the
magazines had been dropped by Revco Drug Stores, People’s
Drug Stores, Rite Aid Drug Stores, the Dart Drug Corporation,
Stop-N-Go, and Lawson’s Milk Company, while J. C. Penney decided
to stop selling Playboy/ Playmate merchandise. The president of
Southland explained that the company had grown disturbed by com-
mission testimony indicating “a growing public awareness and con-
cern over a possible connection between adult magazines and crime,
violence, and child abuse.” 18

Playboy responded angrily to the commission’s prompting of the
7-Eleven ban. Christie Hefner condemned the action as “a response
to the hysteria of the moment” while Robert Scheer, in a blistering
analysis in Playboy titled “Inside the Meese Commission,”
described the panel as “an evangelical soap opera.” PEI also took
legal action, joining with the American Rooksellers Association
and the Magazine Publishers Association to file suit, claiming that
the Meese Commission was creating a “blacklist” that was causing
companies to pull from its shelves publications that had not been ruled
obscene. On July 3, a federal district court judge agreed. He ruled
that the Sears letter contained “an implied threat” that violated the
First Amendment by creating “a prior restraint of speech, a right
so precious in this nation.” He ordered the Meese Commission to
notify the retailers and retract the threat and forbade it from includ-
ing Wildmon’s list of supposed corporate transgressors in its final
report. After this victory, Playboy turned the knife. A few months

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MR. PLAYBOY

later, it ran a pictorial on “The Women of 7-Eleven,” gleefully no t ing
of the Southland ban, “Did we get mad? Did we get even? No. We
got down.” It quoted its alluring subjects decrying how “The religious
groups seem to be taking over” and complaining that “we don’t have
magazines with beautiful women. But we do have magazines on guns
and war and violence.” 19

Playboy quickly gained allies. The National Coalition Against
Censorship, which listed such notable figures as Kurt Vonnegut,
Betty Friedan, and Colleen Dewhurst, characterized the commission
as an attempt to restrict the free expression of ideas. The novelists
John Updike and John Irving wrote letters decrying the threat to
First Amendment rights. Fiberal publications such as the Nation
denounced the commission as a product of cynical Reaganites manip-
ulating misguided feminists while an ACFU spokesman observed,
“I’m afraid there is a train marked ‘censorship’ which has just left the
station.” Women’s rights groups such as the Feminist Anti-Censorship
Task Force (FACT) took issue with the antipomography campaign,
arguing that restrictions on free expression always rebounded to harm
oppressed or less powerful groups. Some conservative newspapers
expressed reservations on libertarian grounds. The Chicago Tribune
observed that opposition to “the unchecked use of government power
used to be one of the main tenets of the conservative faith.” The
Orange County Register described the commission as “bluenosed
bullies” promoting “a betrayal of the principle of strictly limited gov-
ernment on which our nation was founded.” 20

This conflict galvanized Hefner into action. As had not been the
case since the 1950s, he assumed the stance of an outsider battling
the hoary forces of moral authority and sexual restriction. “Suddenly
Playboy is hopping again,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “The magazine
is once again thrust to the ramparts, battling the forces of igno-
rance and repression.” With a renewed sense of relevance, Hefner
reemerged as a happy warrior. 21

The Playboy publisher excoriated religious conservatives who
sought to turn back the clock on the sexual revolution. Since the
1950s, he insisted, intelligent people had come to see sexuality as a
vital part of the human experience. “When I was growing up, continu-
ally our society pitted body and mind against one another, and contin-
ually suggested that the devil is in the flesh,” he said. “It seems to me
that we are doing the same thing all over again.” Sexual liberation was

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

377

an irreversible product of historical change and “what we are seeing
now is really a reaction to that,” he told a radio interviewer. “I think
what happens to some extent is that in the changing of society one
takes two steps forward and one step back. What we’re going through
right now is a kind of digesting of the changes.” 22

A rejuvenated Hefner also took on the Meese Commission
directly. Taking up the editorial pen as he had not since the Playboy
Philosophy frenzy of the early 1960s, he wrote several indignant
pieces in Playboy. Hefner accused the panel of engaging in “sexual
McCarthyism” and “putting on a circus show of misinformation
and innuendo” as it tried to convince the public that erotic materials
were harmful. Rather than researching the facts and probing the work
of social scientists who had studied the subject, the panel “trundled
out a parade of born-again basket cases, anti-sex feminists, and fun-
hating fundamentalists.” After the Sears letter, Hefner accused the
commission of becoming “the tool of evangelical terrorists” and
described the incident as “the first successful use of a national black-
list since the McCarthy era.” 23

Nor did Hefner mince words concerning Meese s feminist allies.
A small faction of the women’s movement had endorsed an antisexual
position, he argued. “I think the fact that the women’s movement
got sidetracked with its anti-porn, anti-sexuality is very, very hurtful
because the women’s movement was supposed to be all about free-
dom. . . . The notion that sexual imagery is demeaning or that sex
itself is somehow demeaning to women, is one of the saddest notions
in terms of our sexuality that I can possibly imagine.” Hefner main-
tained that genuine feminism was about equality in education, the
workplace, and the law. But “Puritanism has always been a part of
the women’s movement. That’s why radical feminists wind up on the
same side as the Christian right-wingers fighting porn.” While vilifi-
cation from feminists hurt, he admitted, it mainly came from a radi-
cal fringe. If progressivism now involved “the attitude that is often
expressed today, that the actual images of the sex act are degrading to
women, then we’re in serious trouble,” Hefner contended. 24

In July 1986, Attorney General Meese released the commission’s
final report in a news conference held in the Great Hall of the Justice
Department. In an amusingly ironic tableau, he spoke in front of the
“Spirit of Justice,” a twelve-foot statue of a woman with one breast
bared. The commission issued what one newspaper described as “a

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MR. PLAYBOY

call to arms against an $8 billion-a-year porn industry,” asserting a
causal link between violent pornography and “acts of sexual violence”
and claiming that nonviolent sexual material had a harmful effect
on society by undermining personal character and devaluing family
life. The two-volume, nearly two-thousand-page report offered
ninety-two recommendations for legal restrictions on pornography.
Perhaps most controversially, the commission encouraged religious
and political groups to file complaints, join with police to root out law-
breakers, and boycott retailers selling objectionable sexual material.
Interestingly, however, it failed to list Playboy and Penthouse among
the forty-five hundred titles it cited as pornographic. Meese himself
tried to reassure skeptics that the Justice Department “is not going to
engage in any censorship that violates the First Amendment.” 25

The attorney general, however, did not discuss the internal split
that had divided the commission as it attempted to formulate its final
report. The original version, drafted by Sears and the staff, proved
so moralistic and heavy-handed that a majority rejected it. Professor
Schauer, describing the draft as “one-sided and oversimplified,”
took it upon himself to write a new one that became the basis for
the report. Even so, two commissioners, Judith Becker and Ellen
Levine, refused to sign the final product and authored a twenty-page
dissenting report. Complaining that a rush to meet deadlines had
caused confusion, they sharply disputed the reports claim of a con-
nection between pornography and sexual violence. “No self-respect-
ing investigator would accept conclusions based on such a study,”
they wrote. Moreover, many researchers on sexual materials, vio-
lence, and crime claimed that the Meese Commission had distorted
their work in drawing its conclusions. Edward Donnerstein, from
the University of Wisconsin, whose research was cited by the panel,
insisted that the commission had reached “bizarre” conclusions, while
Neil Malamuth and Murray Strauss, from UCLA and the University
of New Hampshire, complained that their work had been misused in
an attempt to buttress preordained conclusions. 26

The report generated immediate controversy. Jerry Falwell and
Pat Robertson approved it as “a good and healthy report” and part of
“a definite spiritual revival” in America. Catharine MacKinnon and
Women Against Pornography endorsed it as “a major breakthrough
in raising the consciousness of the country.” Some conservative
columnists, such as Cal Thomas, also approved, contending that

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379

society had a right to establish the minimum standards by which it
wished to live. 27

But most assessments rejected the Meese Commission Report on
grounds of free speech and anticensorship. Liberals characterized it
as a blunderbuss legal attack on behalf of reactionary moral crusaders.
A memorable liberal dismissal came in a, New Republic article cleverly
titled “Big Boobs,” by Hendrik Hertzberg. It was accompanied by
a hilarious cover drawing of Meese as a pinup in the style of Alberto
Vargas: lounging in a sultry pose with one leg bent provocatively, a
hand propped demurely behind his head, a come-hither look on his
face, tie askew, bare feet arched in anticipation. As editor Michael
Kinsley noted puckishly, “Our idea is that in all those empty slots
in 7-Elevens where they used to sell Playboy and Penthouse , now
they use them for the New Republic .” Many conservatives demurred
as well. William F. Buckley deplored pornography but chastised the
commission for sending the intimidating Sears letter and accepting
a mandate it could not possibly fulfill. The National Review asserted
that while pornography degraded the quality of American life, the
panel had failed to establish its thesis empirically. In a special essay,
“The Individual Is Sovereign,” Time argued on behalf of a rule regard-
ing privacy and sexual choices: “Uncle Sam, and all other uninvited
guests, keep out.” 28

Hefner reacted scornfully to the Meese Commission Report. In
a Playboy editorial, he described it as a blueprint for “sex vigilantes”
and quoted Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun, who had
described sexuality as an intimate affair involving “the most compre-
hensive of rights and the most valued by civilized men: namely, the
right to be let alone.” At issue, Hefner passionately insisted in a radio
interview, was sexual freedom. “Whether its related to censorship
or . . . related to personal privacy in the bedroom, that is a fight we
have been fighting in Playboy for some 32 years, and it is one that
I believe in wholeheartedly,” he maintained. “The sexual revolution
is a quest for sexual freedom, both to read and to do in your bedroom
what you want to do. If freedom has become passe, then we are in
very serious trouble.” 29

Most observers agreed with Hefner, but their commentary
should have unsettled the Playboy publisher. Even as they opposed
censorship, defended free speech, and denounced moralistic restric-
tions from extremists on the right or left, most opponents of the

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MR. PLAYBOY

Meese Commission took pains to emphasize that they were bothered
by the sexual invasion of American life. They distanced themselves
from a Playboy ethos they found distasteful. A series of editorials
and columns in the liberal New York Times, for example, granted,
“There is a pornography problem in the United States. Offensively
explicit sex and violence are dispensed with too little regard for
the rights and sensibilities of those who want themselves or their
children shielded from such material.” They observed that among rea-
sonable citizens “millions do worry, uneasily and conscientiously”
about the easy availability of pornographic material in modern
America. The columnist Anna Quindlen, while endorsing sexual
liberation and opposing censorship, complained that sexual images
had become so pervasive that she constantly had to try and explain
them to her young child. Playboy had the right to depict nudity, she
wrote, but “I think the centerfolds are simply silly, and that all those
women miming sexual ecstasy in bizarre undergarments succeed
only in looking as if they had bad colds.” The predominant liberal
position on erotic images — lewd, silly, offensive, problematic, but
legally protected — did not exactly constitute a ringing endorsement
of Playboy values. 30

Thus Hefner s triumph over the Meese Commission played out as
a costly victory. The direct political threat largely evaporated, but a
significant problem remained. The attorney generals panel, with its
two-front ideological assault from the Moral Majority and the feminist
left, highlighted how the evolution of American social and cultural
values by the 1980s had put the Playboy Philosophy on the defen-
sive. “The current atmosphere does seem to be a part of a national
retrenchment from the giddy permissiveness of the 60s and 70s,”
Time observed. The conservative backlash to the Age of Aquarius, the
revolution in womens rights, and the liberal retreat from licentious-
ness increasingly isolated Hefner in the public sphere. Many now saw
him as an agent of sexual manipulation: undermining tradition for
conservatives, encouraging female subordination for many feminists,
and promoting distasteful license for many liberals. 31

In the middle of this ideological struggle, a beleaguered Hefner
suffered an assault from an unexpected direction. A friend launched a
brutal surprise attack that denounced him personally, vilified his val-
ues, and supported the accusations of exploitation coming from the
Moral Majority and radical feminists. Involving as it did the horrific

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murder of Playmate Dorothy Stratten, this shocking onslaught
caused more pain and trauma than perhaps any other single event
in Hefners life.

Ill

In the summer of 1984, the film director Peter Bogdanovich published
The Killing of the Unicom: Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980. In this
emotional and deeply personal book, the boyfriend of the Playmate
and budding actress made a stunning allegation. While her estranged
husband Paul Snider had murdered her four years earlier, he said,
responsibility for the horrifying death lay elsewhere. Most people
blamed the “eternal triangle” of husband, wife, and lover:

But as I tried to find the truth, I discovered a fourth side to the
figure — hidden and dark. Eventually there would be no doubt
in my mind that if the shadowy Hefner-side of the pyramid had
never existed, Dorothy would not have died. She could have
dealt with Paul Snider, a small-town pimp who first spotted
and sold her, but she could not handle the slick professional
machinery of the Playboy sex factory, nor the continual efforts
of its founder to bring her into his personal fold, no matter
what she wanted.

In Bogdanovichs words, “As I found out more and more about
Hefners role in the events, my rage toward him grew.” 32

This attack struck Hefner with full force. For page after page,
Bogdanovich unfolded a relentless indictment of the publisher and
his operation, claiming that they had caused the demise of his beloved
girlfriend. He charged this “Walt Disney of pornography” with leading
an exploitative lifestyle that destroyed women within it. Orgies at
the mansion, he contended, depended on a continuous supply of
fresh-faced, naive females — “the new girl from Iowa, or Missouri,
or Montana” — who would be sexually used, passed around among
Hefners friends, and leered at by voyeurs. Stratten had walked into
this trap, Bogdanovich argued. Hefner yearned to confirm his entry
into Hollywood society and “wanted a real sex goddess to emerge
from the pages of Playboy.” The young woman filled the bill. 33

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MR. PLAYBOY

Bogdanovich claimed that Stratten tearfully had confided to him
that shortly after she had arrived at the mansion, Hefner had forced
himself on her sexually during a late-night Jacuzzi session, an incident that
left her bereft and bitter. During subsequent magazine shoots, the
publisher had pressured her to submit to ever more raunchy photos
that brought her to tears as photographers gave her a puppy to calm
her frazzled nerves. These experiences finally drove Stratten to marry
Paul Snider out of desperation, Bogdanovich wrote, and when
Hefner banned the small-time hustler from the mansion, murder
had resulted. But the blame spread farther. “In truth, doesn’t Playboy
figuratively seduce and rape young women? Live off them? Bidicule
their gender? Destroy their lives?” wrote the director. “Playboy and
its kindred porno mills continue to grind up women and spit them out
for the masturbatory pleasure of men the world over.” Bogdanovich’s
summation pictured Hefner as “a hygienic super-pimp” and his grand
sexual revolution little more than a male ruse “under the guise of
liberalism and equality. Its true purpose was to make things easier
for the men to get laid.” Playboy made women into sexual objects
and encouraged “sordid and violent male crimes like the one which
destroyed Dorothy.” In Bogdanovich’s conclusion, “All of this has
been the result of Hefner’s great con.” 34

Bogdanovich, ironically, had been a friend of Hefner’s. They had
become acquainted in 1976, and their shared love of Hollywood
movies nurtured a bond. Bogdanovich was put on the “gate list” at the
mansion, which meant he could come on the property whenever he
pleased, and he visited frequently — fifty-two times between 1976 and
1980. He called Hefner numerous times and attended Thanksgiving
dinner in 1977 and Christmas dinner in 1978 along with a small circle
of the publisher’s friends. Bogdanovich first met Stratten at the man-
sion, of course, and had confided to Hefner about their developing
love affair. When the publisher received the horrible call from the
police about Stratten’s murder, he immediately phoned Bogdanovich
and over subsequent days offered solace and comfort to the devas-
tated director. Thus Hefner was dumbfounded when he perused an
advance copy of the manuscript in the spring of 1984. “This is so crazy,”
he thought. “It will never be published. The basic theme is a lie.” 35
Hefner’s shock soon intensified. William Morrow published the
book over the objections of Hefner’s attorneys — the publisher had
hired the prestigious Washington law firm of Edward Bennett Williams

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

383

to object to the books libels — by making a few cosmetic changes. Then
Bogdanovich launched an eight-city publicity tour that took him to
television shows, public talks, and newspaper interviews where he
denounced Hefner and Playboy on NBC’s Today show, ABCs Good
Morning America, and CBSs Nightwatch. Throughout, he claimed
that while Stratten had been trapped by Paul Snider, “the larger trap
was the one he [Hefner] lured her into — the whole Playboy world.”
The director elaborated on how his disillusioned girlfriend came to
feel that “she had been used like a game, like a pinball machine.”
Hefner and Playboy were “a social poison which destroys women like
Dorothy Stratten.” 36

Flogging his book, Bogdanovich appeared as a born-again femi-
nist. He told the press that attorneys for the Stratten estate had fded
an amicus curiae brief in support of the antipomography legislation in
Minneapolis drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon,
and testified in behalf of a similar ordinance proposed for Los Angeles.
Bogdanovich sent a message to an antipornography rally held at
Stanford University that denounced the “Playboy pornography mills”
and reported that many women appearing in the magazine had con-
tacted him to testify as to “what Playboy has really done to them. It
exploits them — their minds, their bodies, their dreams.” 37

Bogdanovichs attack appalled and angered Hefner. Throughout
the fall of 1984 and early 1985 he issued impassioned denials of
culpability, asserting that the director, consumed by grief and guilt,
had penned “an outrageous work of fiction which does a terrible injus-
tice to Hugh Hefner and others at Playboy.” The distraught publisher
described The Killing of the Unicorn as a “total fabrication,” a “crazy
story,” and a “guilt trip.” He vehemently denied every accusation,
insisting that Stratten delighted in her association with Playboy and
enjoyed a warm friendship with him. Hefner could only explain the
book as the authors “pathological obsession. I think that what he has
set up and is attacking here is behavior which he himself has done. In
effect, what he is calling Hefner is really his own dark side.” 38

Hefner became fixated on refuting The Killing of the Unicorn.
According to his assistant, Lisa Loving, for months the publisher
“never thought about anything else. He was completely consumed.”
When friends or associates would suggest gently that he should let
it go, arguing that no one really believed Bogdanovich and that it
would blow over, Hefner angrily rejected the advice. “It truly, truly

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MR. PLAYBOY

devastated him,” said Loving. “He was worried about how people
would perceive him. ... It was the most horrible thing that any-
one could ever say about him. And it truly did work him into a com-
plete frenzy .” 39

Hefners obsession stemmed from deep sources. He saw the book
as an unjust betrayal of friendship from someone he had treated
well. The challenge to his personal integrity disturbed him even
more. According to Murray Fisher, a Playboy editor and friend,
Unicom “was his worst nightmare come true. . . . He absolutely had to
prove that he was right because this was a personal attack on him.” But
perhaps most importantly, Hefner understood Bogdanovich’s book to
be an attack on the meaning of his whole adult life. Bitter criticism
from the fundamentalist-feminist alliance had worn Hefner down,
and The Killing of the Unicom seemed to penetrate his defenses
to reach a soft spot of insecurity. As they combed through the text
comma by comma, Loving noticed, “He kept asking, ‘Am I really
like that?’” Hefner confessed privately, “The way I am perceived by
others who are important to me is one of the most important things in
my life and always has been. And there is something in this that just
hits very close to home in terms of . . . what I’m all about .” 40

Self-righteously angry, Hefner became convinced that mental
instability lay behind the assault. He solicited a private evaluation of
the author from a prominent Chicago psychiatrist, who concluded
that the film director was suffering from severe depression, paranoia,
and possibly psychosis. Hefner also got wind of Bogdanovich’s odd
behavior toward Louise Hoogstraten, Dorothy’s thirteen-year-old
sister, and Nelly, the girls’ mother, from a private security agent
who had worked for the director. The improprieties reported by this
source were shocking . 41

As Hefner defended himself, the critical reaction to The Killing of
the Unicom came in. Reviews were almost universally negative. A few
commentators found the book to be tender, moving, and convincing,
but most saw it as maudlin, self-justifying, and exploitative in its own
way. Critics complained that Bogdanovich, while pointing the finger of
blame, seemed oblivious to his own sexist susceptibility to “the whore/
Madonna complex” in his view of women. Typically, they condemned
the book as “simplistic” and concluded that “Bogdanovich’s drippy, shrill
account fails both as memoir and pseudo-sociology. Self-justification,
revenge, and exploitation with a sugary, sanctimonious facade .” 42

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

385

Even so, Playboy and its publisher took a battering. Both feminists
and fundamentalists, of course, in the mold of the Meese Commission,
saw the book as confirming the sleazy, destructive immorality of the
Playboy lifestyle. The noted feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich
wrote that Unicom, while self-delusional and mawkish, lent credence
to the central theme of antipornography feminists: “porn leads to
rape leads to murder; women are victims; and most men . . . have
mayhem on their minds.” In her words, “It says something about
Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner, and his entire commercial empire
that the best-known Playmate of all time is best known for having been
tortured and brutally murdered.” Conservatives concurred, blam-
ing Hefner for creating a “dark world into which a naive, innocent
Canadian girl . . . could be dragged and ultimately consumed.” 43

More disturbingly for Hefner, however, even hostile reviews of
Unicorn seemed to accept its depiction of an exploitative Playboy
world. While dismissing Unicorn, they noted the “scathing indict-
ment of Hefner and his pals” and described him as a “desiccated
hedonist” who cavorted in his “tacky baroque crash pad, the Playboy
Mansion West.” One reviewer observed that while the book failed,
its “most fascinating passages come with Bogdanovich’s searing
behind-the-scenes look at the Playboy lifestyle.” The New Republic
accepted the authors “devastating portrait of Hefner,” while the
respected critic Charles Champlin, in the Los Angeles Times,
described Unicom as “overwrought” but granted its “depressing and
persuasive indictment — the most accusing yet — of Hugh Hefner, his
private life and his public philosophy, and their raunchy confluence
in the Playboy Mansion West in Holmby Hills.” Bogdanovich’s book,
for all its weaknesses, he wrote, demonstrated how “the Hefner phi-
losophy looks retrograde, a denial of the real implications of the
sexual revolution.” 44

Such assaults finally became more than Hefner could bear. Under
tremendous, self-imposed pressure to clear his name, he suffered a
stroke that laid him low for several weeks. Then on April 1, 1985,
against the advice of his daughter and associates, he held a press con-
ference at the mansion. In front of dozens of reporters and several
television crews, he accused Bogdanovich of not only systematically
spreading lies, but of seducing both Louise Hoogstraten, Dorothy’s
underage sister, and Nelly Schaap, her mother, and breaking up the
marriage of the latter. When a reporter asked if Bogdanovich actually

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MR. PLAYBOY

had made love to the teenage Louise, Hefner replied, “Without
question,” and opined that he should be prosecuted for the crime. He
then introduced Burl Eldridge, Nelly’s estranged husband and Louise’s
stepfather, who made a statement supporting Hefners charges. 45

Within days, Louise Hoogstraten filed a lawsuit against Hefner for
slander, libel, and invasion of privacy. Securing legal representation
from the noted feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, she asked for restitu-
tion in the amount of $5 million. A confident Hefner asserted, “It
appears the truth will finally be known.” Indeed, six months later
Hoogstraten dropped the lawsuit. After a handful of depositions
were taken, Allred fled the case and, uncharacteristically, had lit-
tle to say about the decision. “Everything is governed by attorney-
client privilege,” she noted tersely. Hefner believed he knew the
reason: “She thought she had a women’s-rights guy on her hands.
And what she had was something else again.” Then Bogdanovich
issued an apology to Hefner as the suit was dropped. “All of us who
loved Dorothy, and I know Hugh Hefner was one of these, have been
through the roughest of times, and maybe the healing process may
now be accelerated. I am sorry if Mr. Hefners health has suffered
because of things I have said or written.” 46

Ultimately, Hefner was vindicated. As the dust settled, it became
clear that Bogdanovich’s accusations about Hefner were uniformly
false. The story of Hefner’s supposed seduction/rape of Stratten,
as well as much other information in Unicom, it turned out, was
a fabrication from Patrick Curtis. The former husband of Baquel
Welch, Curtis had frequented the mansion for several years before
being banished for dishonesty, and subsequently was caught out
in a highly publicized lie when he claimed to be a decorated
fighter pilot in the Marine Corps; in actuality he had never served
in the military. Apparently in retaliation for the banishment, Curtis
had fed Bogdanovich stories that he later retracted in a signed affida-
vit. The puppy that had allegedly been given to Stratten as a ploy to
quell her hysteria over nude photographs turned out to be a gift from
Playboy photo editor Marilyn Grabowski, who had hoped it would
cheer her up during her escalating fights with her husband, Paul
Snider. Delighted, she named it Marston after Hefner’s middle name.
Stratten’s supposed despair about her involvement with Playboy was
belied by a letter of appreciation to Hefner describing her arrival
in Los Angeles as the “beginning to a whole new life for me. . . .

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

387

I am amazed at the new areas I keep finding in myself, and keep
discovering more and more of life. ... I am so happy that Playboy
has been, and will be, a part of my life. And, Mr. Hefner, Playboy, of
course, is you. Love always, Dorothy Stratten.” In a footnote to this
episode, in 1989 Bogdanovich married Louise Hoogstraten as her
mother publicly bewailed the event, while some fifteen years later
Louise turned to Hefner for support during an ugly divorce from the
film director. 47

As the Bogdanovich controversy ground to a halt, Hefner expressed
delight “that my true relationship with Dorothy Stratten has been
clarified.” But his victory came with many casualties. This unseemly
scandal seemed to grip and damage everyone who touched it. Most
commentators were disgusted by the Bogdanovich-Hefner dispute
(even as they rushed to write about it), describing it as “a media
circus” and a “public relations war.” They saw the director as a self-
righteous twister of facts, while one wrote, “It was sad, somehow,
watching Hugh Hefner . . . maligning the reputation of a teen-age girl
and bickering over the bones of a Playboy Playmate five years dead.”
Even Hefner confessed to Rolling Stone that the feud was “just so
bad-taste Hollywood” it made him sick. 48

In a memo written early in the Unicom quarrel, Playboy editor
Arthur Kretchmer had warned Hefner against overreacting to the
book. “In your effort to destroy Bogdanovich s credibility, you will
destroy your own,” he argued. Ugly sexual accusations against the film
director, even if they were true, would only cause people to recoil as
they saw a victim “defending himself by accusing his accuser of kiddie
sex. Instead of being seen as a good guy, a man victimized by a guilt-
ridden, scapegoating parasite, you’ll be one of the players in a taw-
dry story.” Kretchmer’s crystal ball proved to be accurate. For many,
Hefners vindication was overshadowed by the flurry of accusations
and counteraccusations about orgies, underage sex, attempted rape,
pornographic media mills, pathological lovers, and jilted, murderous
husbands. Far from appearing glamorous, playful, and avant-garde,
Hefners world appeared to many observers through a haze of vulgar,
poisonous smog. The frenzied mudslinging of the Bogdanovich con-
troversy, in this larger sense, only contributed to Playboys troubles
in the age of Reagan. 49

Ultimately, however, the private impact of the Bogdanovich con-
flict was even more profound for Hefner than its public implications.

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MR. PLAYBOY

Again, Kretchmer proved prescient. Early on, he cautioned Hefner
about “the intensity of your feelings” and warned that going after the
Unicom author was “almost guaranteed to tear you to pieces.” By
early 1985, such disintegration became apparent. In the middle of
the controversy, before he knew how things would play out, Hefner
grimly internalized stress as he absorbed a drubbing in the press and
struggled to defend his integrity. Additional pressures came from the
disastrous Carrie Leigh relationship and the political bludgeoning
from the Meese Commission. Approaching the edge of emotional
and physical exhaustion, a beleaguered Hefner finally collapsed. 50

PART V

RESURGENCE

The Bride Wore Clothes

I n the early spring of 1985, Hugh Hefner suffered a physical breakdown.
I This health crisis, caused by escalating stress in his personal and
I professional life, frightened him badly and marked the nadir of
this difficult period. An unorthodox medical treatment orchestrated
by his personal physician restored him to normal functioning in a
surprisingly short time, but the experience shook him and prompted
a reevaluation of priorities. It liberated the publisher to cut through
the entanglements of the Dorothy Stratten controversy and hold the
press conference exposing his nemesis, Peter Bogdanovich. It also
prompted him to adopt a healthier lifestyle as he slowed down, gave
up smoking, changed his diet, and began to exercise.

In a deeper sense, however, Hefners stroke inspired him to recon-
sider his personal life. Rethinking his priorities, he initiated a search
for succor and stability that gradually led to the last thing many
people ever expected to see: matrimony, monogamy, and a family.
Initially, he tried to create a stable bond with his current girlfriend,
Carrie Leigh, but the growing volatility of their relationship bred
disenchantment. When that romance crumbled, he turned elsewhere
late in the decade and fell deeply in love with a young woman newly

391

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MR. PLAYBOY

arrived at the mansion. To the shock of many observers, they married
within a short time.

Mr. Playboy transformed himself once again as he took on the
unfamiliar role of husband and father. Just as Hefner and Playboy
had mirrored American social evolution in earlier decades, now, too,
his embrace of an orthodox family life mirrored what some observers
termed the “new traditionalism” of the 1990s. As Hefner entered his
autumn years, he seemed to come full circle from rebellion to rea-
sonableness, from hedonistic bachelor to dedicated family man. The
process proved to be as dramatic as it was unexpected.

In the early morning hours of March 7, 1985, Hugh Hefner
was perusing the next days Los Angeles Times in his bedroom
suite when he found himself unable to follow the article or
comprehend the headline. He called his doctor, who told him to take
an aspirin and go to sleep. By next morning, however, the symptoms
had grown worse. When he phoned his executive assistant, Mary
O’Connor, he slurred his speech and struggled to express simple
thoughts. Staff rushed to his side and noticed that the right side of
his face was palsied. Immediately, they called his doctor and the pub-
lisher went for a series of tests that afternoon. A neurologist asked
him to name ordinary items — buttons on a shirt, a tie, a belt — but
the publisher could not do so. He also lost the ability to read, could
use his right hand only clumsily, and appeared mildly disoriented.
An MRI at a Pasadena hospital a short time later — he was whisked
there by helicopter — confirmed the diagnosis. Hefner had suffered
a stroke. 1

Over the next several days, Hefners situation remained serious
as his neurological signs continued fluctuating. Morbidly afraid of
hospitals, he prevailed upon his close friend and physician, Dr. Mark
Saginor, to supervise a course of treatment at the mansion. Saginor,
concluding that anxiety reduction was crucial to recovery, agreed and
moved into a guest bedroom to supervise around-the-clock care. He
consulted the noted neurologist Dr. Clark Espy, and they concluded
that Hefner had suffered a moderately severe episode of RIND,
or reversible ischemic neurological deficit. They also agreed on a

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393

plan of treatment that centered on the aggressive administration of
high doses of dexamethasone, a research medication. This unusual
approach proved remarkably successful, and within a few days Hefner
began to recover. Complete recuperation took several months, how-
ever. Christie Hefner, who flew to Los Angeles to comfort her father
not long after the stroke, entered his bedroom and saw him reading
a book in bed. Her surprise turned to despair when it became appar-
ent that he was presenting a brave front — the book was upside down.
Carrie Leigh’s flightiness also muddied the waters. She devoted her-
self to nursing Hefner for several weeks, but then in the middle of
the crisis presented him with a demand for marriage. When Hefner
demurred, she wrote him a “Dear John” letter and fled the mansion
in early April, only to return several weeks later. 2

Hefner, along with his close friends and associates, had little doubt
as to what had brought on the stroke — stress, caused both by the
turbulent Carrie Leigh relationship and the nasty accusations leveled
by Bogdanovich. The former kept his personal life in a constant state
of tension, while the latter, as Hefner confessed in an interview later
in 1985, “proved absolutely devastating for me.” He had heeded his
advisers by limiting his response to The Killing of the Unicom, but
repressing his anger created enormous tension, especially when some
observers suggested, in his words, that “I was avoiding the confronta-
tion because I had something to hide.” Moreover, a dynamic of self-
punishment seemed to be at work. Worn down by attacks from the
Moral Majority and radical feminists, weary from dealing with Leigh’s
antics, and reeling from the hostile publicity generated by Unicom,
Hefner, for one of the few times in his life, began to doubt himself.
“I suppose I half-believed what Bogdanovich was saying about me,”
he admitted later. “That’s what brought the stroke on.” 3

But Hefner quickly recovered his equilibrium. On March 20
he released a statement to the press explaining his recovery from
this medical trauma, which he described as ‘“a stroke of luck’ that
I fully expect will change the direction of my life.” Indeed, it did.
First, he interpreted it as releasing him emotionally to reply fully to
Peter Bogdanovich’s accusations, and the mansion press conference
was the result. The stroke also prompted Hefner to slow down and
adopt a more easygoing attitude toward life. It “gave me permission
in a single day to drop the luggage of my lifetime,” he explained.
“The priorities in a person’s life shift very dramatically in the most

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MR. PLAYBOY

positive kind of way.” Cognizant of his mortality, he quit smoking his
pipe, began eating more healthy foods, gave up Pepsi for Diet Pepsi,
and began to exercise moderately. He also decided to begin work on
an autobiography — “looking for the reasons behind why Pve lived my
life the way I have,” in his words — as a way of understanding himself
and his past. 4

Perhaps most significantly, the stroke prompted Hefner to recon-
sider his romantic life in all of its emotional and sexual complexity.
He began to seriously ponder the possibility of a more lasting rela-
tionship. Such an impulse had flickered in the early 1980s, first with
Shannon Tweed and then with Carrie Leigh, but now it became more
concerted. In the aftermath of the stroke, he intensified his efforts
to settle down with Leigh over the next two years, an impulse that
partly explained his baffling patience with her erratic behavior. But
the effort fizzled as their stormy relationship blew hot and cold, and
Leigh departed for good in early 1988. 5

But Hefners growing desire for permanence remained in place.
His good friends Dick and Anne Stewart once thought they were
alone in a room of the mansion as they sat together, smooching and
laughing about some incident in years past. “We didn’t realize that Hef
was standing at the door,” Anne recalled. “He came in and said, ‘Wow,
that’s something I’ve never had — a memory to share with a girlfriend
from a long time ago.’” While his tone was joking, she sensed that
he envied their closeness. Dick added, “I always had the feeling that
he admired our relationship because we were lovers and buddies.”
Always believing that the best cure for a failed love affair was to find
another one quickly, Hefner responded to Carrie Leigh’s departure
by looking for another romance. He did not have to wait long. 6

Hefner’s growing desire for emotional permanence and security
soon found an object. Kimberly Conrad, a tall, statuesque, strik-
ingly beautiful twenty-four-year-old honey blonde, had first visited
the mansion on May 22, 1987, and spent several days shooting her
upcoming centerfold photos. On her Playmate Data Sheet, she listed
her ambitions to continue modeling and then become a commercial
real estate agent. “I want to lead a fulfilling life,” she wrote. “Travel,

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395

experience new places, meet lots of people, and do well in my career
and personal life.” But with Carrie Leigh still around, Conrad kept
her distance from Hefner. 7

On January 19, 1988, however, she returned to the mansion as
Miss January to shoot a future Playboy pictorial, this time with the
famed photographer Helmut Newton. With Leigh now gone for
good, Conrads beauty and pleasant manner caught Hefners eye. He
chatted with her, but she dodged his invitation to screen a movie
and kept a girlfriend nearby for emotional protection. He finally
said, “Would you like to spend some time with me?” She replied,
“Well, I don’t really know you.” He said, “How are you going to get
to know me if you don’t spend some time with me?” She conceded
his logic, and they spent the next three hours talking; by the end of
the evening, in Hefner’s words, “we knew that we cared about one
another.” The publisher had flowers put in her room, and invited
her to return to the mansion quickly for another visit. Conrad came
back for the Super Bowl weekend ten days later, and went out for
dinner with Hefner, Dick and Anne Stewart, John Dante, and Keith
Hefner. She found the publisher to be gentlemanly, attentive, and
a lot of fun. In her words, “We had a blast and we really liked each
other.” The spark of romance quickly burst into flame. At Hefner’s
invitation, she moved into the mansion in early February and the two
became a couple. 8

Like Hefner’s last two girlfriends, Conrad was Canadian. Born in
Moulton, Alabama, on August 6, 1963, she had moved with her fam-
ily to Beno, Nevada, four years later, and then to Vancouver. Conrad
grew up as the youngest among three sisters and a brother in the
affluent suburb of West Vancouver, that city’s equivalent of Beverly
Hills. Her mother had divorced and remarried, and her stepfather
was a successful financier. She experienced a traditional upbring-
ing with a conscientious mother, a love of animals, and days filled
with sporting activities such as squash, water skiing, and racquetball.
By adolescence, Conrad had developed a reserved manner with a
touch of quirky humor, strong family attachments, and a set of con-
ventional, even conservative social values. She began to model in
high school and after graduation made it a career. After promoting a
host of local and regional products, she spent two stints in New York
City and eventually appeared in commercials for McDonald’s and
Levi’s jeans. 9

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MR. PLAYBOY

She first came into contact with Playboy in Vancouver through Ken
Honey, the photographer who had discovered a number of Canadian
models for the magazine over the years, including Dorothy Stratten.
He first noticed Conrad when perusing some modeling shots, but she
was only seventeen, so he urged her to contact him in a few years
for some test photos. Being rather reserved and traditional, she had
little interest. But several years later, after breaking up with a longtime
boyfriend and primed for a “shock value” gesture, she called up Honey
and said she was ready to pose for test shots. He took the photos, sent
them to Los Angeles, and Playboy expressed an immediate interest.
The young Canadian flew down, met with photo editor Marilyn
Grabowski, and was slated to become the first Playmate of 1988. 10

When she attracted Hefners attention early that year, Conrad
seemed to embody everything that he sought in a woman. A con-
firmed homebody, she liked nothing more than staying in comfort-
able domestic surroundings watching movies and tending to animals.
Reserved and sweet-tempered, she mixed easily with people but pre-
ferred to stay in the background rather than be the center of atten-
tion. Gorgeous yet modest in her clothing tastes, she exhibited a
natural beauty that contrasted with her predecessors plastic surgery
and glitzy fashion sense. With no interest in a Hollywood career, she
appeared content to focus on Hefner and their life together when
they became a couple. Conrad reconciled some of the publishers
conflicted desires by being both a stunning centerfold and a devoted,
traditional woman. Hefner was smitten. “I can’t believe how all of this
has worked out,” he told USA Today in March 1988. “Out of nowhere,
to have this angel arrive and change everything. How lucky can a
guy get?” 1 !

Hefners circle of mansion friends was almost as infatuated as he
was. After the turmoil of the previous half decade, they saw Conrads
calming, caring influence as a godsend. As she sat watching weekend
movies with Hefner, while he smilingly welcomed her menagerie of
dogs and cats into his home, onlookers were thrilled. They saw her
as a warm, wonderful, down-to-earth woman with no agendas and
no hang-ups. “Kimberly is perfect for him,” observed Hefners old
friend Joni Mattis. 12

As the romance bloomed, it revived Hefner emotionally. Friends
noticed that he seemed to shed ten years overnight as his step
quickened and his good-humored enthusiasm for life bubbled up.

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In Conrads company, he seemed happily at peace with the world.
Jessica Hahn described them acting like “a couple of teenagers who
just got pinned and were going steady,” while Hefner crony Richard
Brooks observed, “Everything about her is reassuring to him and
when he sees her it is like an electric spark hits him, like a twenty year
old.” The publisher seemed euphoric. “In this relationship, I have
found something I never found before,” he told the New York Times.
“I never thought I would find it.” An incurable romantic, he saw their
love as the essential element that animated his existence: “It is the
equivalent of life for me.” 13

Over the next few months, this whirlwind romance gathered speed,
and soon Hefner stood ready to do the unthinkable. Notoriously
averse to matrimony, he had often repeated the Woody Allen quip
that “marriage is the death of hope.” But now he threw his past reser-
vations to the wind. On the evening of July 23, 1988, after watching
a movie, White Mischief, with friends at the mansion and playing
foosball together in the gamehouse, the couple took a walk and
stopped at the wishing well on the front lawn. “Will you marry me?”
Hefner asked. “Do I have to tell you right now?” she replied, and,
slightly flustered, he stammered, “No, of course not.” Conrad then
laughed and said, “I can’t imagine life without you. Yes, I will marry
you.” Later that evening, Conrad wrote down her hope that “Hef
and I stay together forever because I love him so much and he
adores and loves me.” A short time later, Hefner presented her with
a five-and-a-half-carat diamond engagement ring. 14

It was a genuine love match. In the many interviews that accom-
panied their engagement announcement, the couple appeared “as
gooey and mushy as any lovebirds,” as one reporter put it. “They fin-
ish each others sentences. They like to putter around the house. It’s
enough to send a person into insulin shock.” Conrad expressed confi-
dence that her famous fiance was ready to settle down. “I think he has
sown his wild oats. I know he has,” she said. “If I didn’t feel that he
has, or if I felt he would cheat on me, then I would not be married to
him.” Describing him as a “soul mate,” she often grew teary-eyed in
talking about the closeness of their relationship. Conrad stressed the
depth of her commitment, explaining that he had become the “main
focus” of her life. Hefner reciprocated her devotion. “This is the way
you’d like it to be,” he explained to the Los Angeles Times. “There’s
a line in the film Pennies From Heaven which goes something like,

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‘Somewhere there must be a world where the words to the songs are
true.’ And it’s difficult for me to even say that line without getting a
little silly, a little teary-eyed.” 15

Hefner justified his decision to wed as an update, not a rejection,
of the Playboy Philosophy. He romanticized marriage. In a long inter-
view with a reporter from the Sacramento Bee, he argued that his
magazine focused on the romantic relationship between men and
women, and the sexual pleasure that should invigorate it. Marriage,
in and of itself, he now insisted, did not belie that emphasis. “In all
of life, we make compromises between the adventure of it and the
security of it — the unknown and the known,” he mused. “One of
the reasons I avoided marriage all these years is that I think in many
instances marriage, and the certainty of it, destroys romance. I don’t
care very much about marriage, per se. I care very much about love
and romance.” Now, the publisher was convinced, he had found a
mate with whom romance would flourish, not wither. 16

Hefner’s former girlfriends saw more practical factors at work.
Barbi Benton credited his new fiancee’s willingness to mold herself
to his wishes. “She likes to stay inside and not go out to dinner. She
has no anxiety about being an actress. She has his interests always in
mind,” she commented. Sondra Theodore sensed social and biologi-
cal pressures at work. “Everyone he had been involved with is mar-
ried and having babies,” she observed. “He knows it’s time to lead
a more conventional life.” Shannon Tweed, with typical bluntness,
attributed it to his desire for a new challenge: “He’s done it all and
this is what’s left.” 17

As the date for the wedding approached, a flurry of activity
dominated mansion life. On April 25, 1989, Hefner, in the annual cer-
emony, announced that Conrad had been chosen as Playmate of the
Year. Two months later, the cover of the June issue proclaimed, “Thi s
Playmate of the Year Is a Playmate for a Lifetime.” The accompanying
piece presented a gallery of enticing photographs of Conrad, along
with a long description of her romance with Hefner, their engagement,
and the closeness of their relationship. As a Playboy writer noted
breathlessly, “It will be one of the most startling developments of the
century if Hef, whose career has symbolized bachelorhood, comes
to represent marriage, American style, in the Nineties.” Meanwhile,
Conrad chose an off-white gown created by the New York designer
Jim Hjelm, while the Los Angeles designer and friend Bick Pallack

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created a 1940s-look tuxedo with white silk bow tie for Hefner. Colin
Cowie, a young Englishman, became the wedding coordinator and
spent five hectic weeks organizing the affair. Conrads friends gave
her a traditional bridal shower, but Hefner declined the counterpart.
“I had a bachelor party for the last 30 years,” he joked. “I don’t need
one now.” 18

Finally, on July 1, 1989, in an event that few observers of
Mr. Playboy ever expected to see, Hefner and Conrad were married
in a lavish ceremony at the mansion. Some 150 guests attended,
sitting in neat rows of chairs in the front yard up by the wishing
well where Hefner had proposed. The groom played pinball with his
brother, best man Keith Hefner, for a half hour before the ceremony,
but as he took his place to await his bride’s arrival, he realized he
had forgotten to bring the ring. “Probably Freudian in some way,”
he quipped. When he reappeared after dashing back up the stairs
to retrieve it, the guests cheered. A nervous Conrad, after an attack
of lightheadedness and crying, composed herself and came down the
aisle smiling on the arm of her father. Both bride and groom grew
tearful during the ceremony, but a lighthearted mood prevailed.
When the presiding clergyman, the Reverend Charles D. Ara,
asked the traditional question about heeding her husband, Conrad
commented, “That may be going a little too far.” And when Hefner
said his final “I do,” Ara called out jokingly to the crowd, “You heard
him say that? Everybody out there — he said it!” 19

With the ceremony complete, four hundred additional guests
arrived for the reception held in a huge white satin tent covering
the whole backyard and containing some ten thousand white roses.
After enjoying champagne and caviar, guests adjourned to tables set
with silver and crystal for an elaborate multicourse meal featuring
smoked salmon, imported cheese, watercress salad, roasted baby
potatoes, steak medallions, lamb, grilled baby chicken, and elabo-
rate Viennese desserts. Famous guests such as Bill Cosby, Robert
Culp, Angie Dickinson, Mark Hamill, James Caan, Berry Gordy,
Tony Curtis, and Alexander Godunov strolled through the crowd. All
of Hefner’s family and old friends — Shel Silverstein, FeRoy Neiman,
Art Paul, John Dante, and Eldon Sellers, along with his Chicago
club-hopping buddies from the late 1950s — were in attendance,
as well as a trio of old girlfriends. As he posed for a photograph
with Barbi Benton, Sondra Theodore, and Shannon Tweed, the

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publisher put his arm around them and joked, “I may have made a
terrible mistake.” 20

Hefners marriage clearly demarcated the end of an era. “Holy
Matrimony!” People magazine exclaimed on its cover, next to awed-
ding photo of the happy couple. “The bride wore white. Hey, she wore
clothes! Next week: Hell freezes over.” Indeed, this pivotal event in
the late 1980s opened the door to a new stage in the publishers life.
As he moved to adopt a more customary lifestyle and traditional
set of values, Hefner interpreted his return from the frontiers of
bachelor hedonism as a variation on the tale of the prodigal son. After
starting out with marriage, then abandoning that for three decades
of bachelorhood and sexual adventure, he “came full circle” to a kind
of belated homecoming. Hefner embraced, even reveled in, the
delights of family life. For the press and public, who had witnessed
the publishers sexual escapades for the last three decades, it proved
a fascinating sight. 21

Ill

As the 1990s began, the new, domesticated Hugh Hefner appeared on
full display. Close friends and distant admirers alike saw a man who,
to use one of his favorite words, had “reinvented” himself in the mold
of a monogamous family man. Always concerned with explaining his
life, the publisher reflected publicly, and at length, on this surprising
reorientation. In one sense, Hefner, as well as many critics, agreed
that his settling down reflected the traditionalist tone of the age. He
described the notion of a Playmate for a lifetime as “right for this
particular time, which is kind of conservative.” Analyzing his decision
to wed, the New York Times concurred that “certainly the times are at
play here, the AIDS-fearing, commitment-oriented times.” Another
newspaper suggested, “the motto of the 1990s will become, ‘Lets go
home.’ And the aging playboy, who lost a step or two when he suf-
fered a mild stroke, will stay home to live the simple life A.B. (After
Bunnies).” Hefner relished the irony, telling People, “Wouldn’t it be
unique if my life became a symbol of the conservative decade ahead,
just as it was a symbol of the swinging 60s and 70s?” 22

Yet it was obvious to all that Hefner and his new bride were deeply
in love. His happiness was so complete that “sometimes I think I must

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be dreaming,” he told friends. He underlined the fairy-tale romance
by arranging for a European nobleman to conduct a lighthearted cer-
emony, complete with sword on the shoulder, declaring her Princess
“Kimberella.” In an interview with the London Daily Express, Hefner
expressed his complete contentment. “Before I met her, I had always
had a sense that there would be another girl on the horizon and the
promise of some new romance,” he explained. “But with her I feel
totally fulfilled.” 23

Hefner even approved as his beautiful, strong-willed young wife
began overhauling decades of tradition at the Playboy Mansion.
Kimberly Conrad Hefner, despite her appearance as a Playmate, was
in many ways a traditional woman whom her husband occasionally
compared to his mother — straight, conventional, strict. The break-
neck speed of their romance had been a bit overwhelming — they
had married within eighteen months of their first date — but now
the young woman moved to establish herself as the mistress of the
Playboy Mansion. She directed an upgrade of the mansion menu,
instructing the staff of chefs and cooks to stress fresh ingredients
and innovative cuisine. She redecorated several of the bedrooms,
replacing a heavy, gaudy decorative style with lighter, more ele-
gant elements. Kimberly also became a friend and defender of the
mansion’s many Hispanic employees, whom she felt were treated
too harshly by some of their supervisors. She even convinced Hefner
to give up his satin sheets — leftovers from the orgiastic 1970s — and
adopt sensible cotton ones. 24

Kimberly also sought to tone down the raucous eroticism that
had prevailed for the last two decades. She asked Hefner to send
away the gaggle of female friends and Playmates who hung around
the mansion as a matter of course. “She’s made it clear that this is
her home and people just can’t wander in and out now like they
always have,” said a Playboy spokesman. “They must be cordially
invited.” Casual male friends on the prowl for beautiful women, who
used the mansion as a kind of resort hotel — Kimberly described how
she was “tired of seeing people I don’t even know at the breakfast
table” — were politely notified that invitations were now required.
Mrs. Hefner requested that guests refrain from public nudity at the
pool and grotto. “I want this to be more like a real home,” she told
the press. “The girls still come over, but they’re wearing their bathing
suits. I think that’s nice.” The bare-breasted Barbi Benton bust that

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sat in the library for many years disappeared into basement storage.
“This is my house — not Barbi’s — so why should I have that sitting in
my library?” she explained. Polite but firm, Conrad Hefner made it
clear that a new ambiance of family and home would prevail. 25

Critics and the public were fascinated by the publishers new
lifestyle. Life magazine did a full spread titled “Mrs. Bunny,” which
detailed in words and photos how the Hefner marriage ended “the
30-year bachelorhood of Americas most publicized womanizer.”
Chatelaine, the popular Canadian womens magazine, detailed
monogamous married bliss at the mansion and concluded that in
a society increasingly bored with recreational sex, it would be “the
final triumph of Hef s career to live out his life in the company of a
devoted helpmate.” Beporters from the Los Angeles Times blinked in
disbelief at the sight of Mr. Playboy biting into a piece of apple cake
with whipped cream frosting and joking, “This is what passes for sin
at the Playboy Mansion West these days.” 26

Perhaps the most famous commentary on revamped life at the
mansion, however, came in Doonesbury, the award-winning cartoon
series. Garry Trudeau, its creator, first poked fun at Hefner’s wedding.
He pictured a loudspeaker announcement: “Out of respect for the
sanctity of the occasion, we’d like to ask couples to refrain from using
the grotto until after the ceremony.” As the revelers howled “Aww!”
in dissent, one of them muttered sourly, “It’s her. She’s changed him.”
Then another cartoon depicted a stricter announcement going out to
scantily clad guests lounging at the pool. “May I have your attention
please? From now on we’re going to have a few new rules around
here. I’m getting tired of coming down every morning to a lot of
faces I don’t even recognize,” said a female voice. “No more ‘friend
of a friend,’ okay? Also, no more frontal nudity at breakfast. It’s a
bit much. And no full frontal nudity until after 5 P.M.! In general,
I expect everyone to be a whole lot more discreet, especially in the
Jacuzzi! Everybody understand?” As a chorus of “Yes, Mrs. Hefner,”
“Sorry, Mrs. Hefner,” came from the crowd, the same disgruntled
guest grumbled, “There go the 70s.” 27

The transformation of Hefner’s life became more pronounced
with fatherhood. When the couple had first broached the subject
of marriage, she had brought up the question of children and he
had said “absolutely.” Within a few weeks of the wedding Kimberly
became pregnant, and on April 9, 1990, Marston Glenn Hefner was

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bom on Hugh’s birthday, an occurrence that seemed almost magical
to his father. With both parents wanting another child close in age
so they could grow up together, Kimberly quickly became preg-
nant again, and Cooper Bradford Hefner arrived in the world on
September 4, 1991. 28

Hefner found true delight in his sons. Admitting that he had not
been much of a father back in the 1950s with his first two children,
he now vowed to make up for the lapse. He ordered that the yel-
low diamond-shaped sign on the mansion driveway be changed from
“Playmates at Play” to “Children at Play.” The sight of kids’ toys scat-
tered about the floor of the great hall became a common one, and
it moved him to tears. He played with the boys on the lawn, pushed
them on their swing set, and read comic books to them. When they
became fascinated with superheroes, he dressed in a Batman cos-
tume for their entertainment. “In my entire life, I could not have
imagined such happiness and fulfillment in this very traditional way,”
Hefner confessed to the Los Angeles Times. “I cannot express the
magic these two children have brought to my life.” 29

The arrival of children strengthened Kimberly’s resolve to clean
up the mansion. With maternal impulses at full throttle, she deter-
mined to create a true family home and prune people she believed
were sullying the atmosphere. She had several run-ins with Steve
Powers, for instance, a longstanding mansion crony with a leg-
endary playboy reputation. Tired of watching him bring a succession
of young women to the mansion for seduction, she finally snapped
when it got back to her that he had been seen having sex in the
gamehouse over Easter weekend. Deeming this totally inappro-
priate for a family setting, she confronted him and demanded an
end to “the bimbo of the week.” Kimberly also clashed with John
Dante, another old friend who had lived at the mansion off and on
for twenty years and been part of Hefner’s sexual escapades in the
1970s. A failed club owner with a penchant for running up gam-
bling debts, Dante had become a kind of mansion pensioner who
did not fit into the new family-oriented atmosphere. He departed
in the summer of 1993. Kimberly also recast many mansion social
events to revolve more around families and committed couples and
less around recreational sex. At her request, Hefner discontinued
the raucous Midsummer Night’s Dream party in 1994. The annual
New Year’s Eve party switched from pajamas and negligees to black

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MR. PLAYBOY

tie and formal gowns, an event that Marston and Cooper, dressed in
their own mini-tuxes, attended with their parents. The annual Easter
Egg Hunt, originally a risque holdover from the 1970s where celebri-
ties searched for eggs emblazoned with suggestive slogans, became
a genuine child-centered party where kids combed the property for
hand-decorated eggs and prizes. 30

Hefner was too enthralled with his wife and children to take
much heed. Proclaiming, “Eve managed to romanticize marriage and
children,” he contended that his present situation belied the famous
F. Scott Fitzgerald statement that there are no second acts in American
lives. “Eve managed to have a third act, and it has turned out to be
the most fulfilling of all,” he said. He also shaped a new perspective
on the frantic, obsessive quality of his earlier, hedonistic days. Hefner
now saw them as setting the stage for his final, mature appearance
as a family man. His compulsive pursuit of sex and pleasure seemed
aimed at trying to prove something to himself and others. “I confess
that when I review some of the old film of myself, I start to squirm,”
he told one interviewer, because he saw “a guy desperate to be desir-
able to the opposite sex. A guy hungry for acceptance and love. A guy
who could be full of shit.” But now he had determined to “put all the
masks I used to wear, all the games I used to play, behind me,” he
admitted to another. Kimberly and his young sons provided “the safe
harbor that I was searching for all my life.” Confessing that he was
more content than he had ever been, he saw his “September years”
as providing a happily-ever-after ending to the movie of his life. 31

In the early 1990s, Hefner, incredibly, became a spokesman for
many of the values he had decried over the past four decades. When
a reporter suggested that he had become a “traditional family-values
kind of guy,” the publisher responded, “It’s true. In my heart, I think I
probably always have been. I think I have come full circle to living life
very similar to my parents.” In November 1993, Hefner appeared in
back-to-back episodes of two family-friendly NBC sitcoms, Blossom
and The Fresh Prince of Bel- Air. “The Playboy philosophy is expressed
in away that is positive and family-oriented,” he explained of his new
public posture. “Eve settled down and Playboy has become very main-
stream.” He appreciated the ironic humor attending the situation.
When People magazine asked if his new family-man image would
hurt business, Hefner quipped, “Quite the contrary. America loves a
redeemed sinner.” 32

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Hefners family and friends were happy to see his newfound
domestic contentment. Keith Hefner noted that his brother didn’t
“seem to have anything left to prove, to himself or anyone else” and
was “much more at peace than he’s ever been before. And much
more open as a person.” Joe Piastre, the crusty longtime head of
security at the mansion, joked good-naturedly about his boss’s new-
found domesticity. “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve signed in
governors, mayors of large cities, movie stars, presidential hopefuls,
police officers, sports stars, big-time industrialists, and so on,” he said.
“I never thought I’d see the day when I signed in Dy-Dee Diaper
Service. Shit! What’s this world coming to?” Even fellow playboy
Steve Powers, on Hefner’s seventieth birthday in 1996, congratulated
him on his ability “to transcend the life of the flesh to go for what is
really important: romance, family, love.” 33

Hefner’s late-life commitment to traditional values elicited
much public commentary. Reporters flocked to the mansion to
witness the remarkable images of Mr. Playboy ensconced in family
bliss. “Hefner’s legendary bachelor days are definitely behind him.
There’s a baby swing hanging not far from the tree that shades the
wishing well where Hefner proposed to Conrad,” noted the Chicago
Tribune. “A playpen fills a corner of the family gymnasium, where
a life-sized photograph of Conrad hangs. The dog houses behind
the well-stocked game room have moved to make way for the baby’s
playground and swing set.” Periodicals churned out a long list of
phrases and headlines to describe the mansion’s new domestic bliss:
“Hef’s Haven,” “The Happy Hefners,” “F ather Knows Best is his way
now,” “The Taming of a Playboy,” “All-American Dream Comes True
for Hefner.” 34

The new Hefner also received celluloid commemoration. In the
fall of 1992, a documentary film chronicling his life appeared around
the country. Titled Once Upon a Time , and produced by David
Lynch and Mark Frost, it originally had been a half-hour segment
in their 1990 American Chronicles television series. Hefner liked it
so much that he commissioned a ninety-minute version for theaters
and cable television. The publisher contributed significantly, and
it emerged as something of an autobiography. The film presented
his life as an evolution toward his present state of affairs, opening
with scenes of his wedding as he commented on his discovery that
“happiness could be found in something very traditional, in the love

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of a special woman and a home and a family.” After examining his
long career as a prophet of pleasure and liberation, the film closed
with idyllic images of Hefner as he sat on the lawn with his wife and
their two children. “What I found in the relationship with Kimberly,
in the marriage, in at long last having a more traditional family and
children, is that to some extent IVe come home again to values very
similar to those of my parents. But I don’t think I could have got there
without that other trip,” he reflected. “That trip was necessary for me
to really find myself and make sense of it all.” 35

The turn toward traditionalism in Hefners private life also influ-
enced, albeit more subtly, his magazine and his company in the 1990s.
After years of championing the cause of liberation during the Age of
Aquarius and then battling a strong conservative backlash through-
out the 1980s, Playboy moved toward an accommodation between
the two. Like its founder, indeed, like much of America, Hefners
magazine tacked toward the middle, seeking to carve out a welcom-
ing space for the mature family man as well as the carefree bach-
elor. It tried to make room for sexual expression and moral restraint,
personal pleasure and meaningful relationships, self-fulfillment and
family responsibility.

All in the Family

I n September 1995, Playboy readers encountered “Classic Kimberly,”
I a text-and-photo story depicting Kimberly Conrad Hefner as the
I ideal modern woman: part loving wife, part devoted mother, and
part erotic siren. Striking nude photos of the tall, voluptuous thirty-
two-year-old with the light hair and penetrating blue eyes accom-
panied her extensive reflections on life as Mrs. Playboy. “Hef and
the kids are what my life is all about, not the houses and money
and all the people that come and go,” she said. The scattering of
children s toys, the jungle gym, and the swing set reminded every-
one that while the Playboy Mansion was her husbands workplace, it
had now become a family haven. Hollywood was a tough town, she
admitted, but memories of smaller, more intimate communities with
“a different mentality, with people helping people and family values”
guided her. “Kimberly is all about family,” the story concluded. “Hef,
Marston and Cooper are blessed indeed.” 1

This article exemplified how Playboy trimmed its sails to capture
the prevailing cultural winds in America during the last decade of the
twentieth century. In the 1990s, a chastened liberalism from the 1960s
sought reconciliation with the fervent conservatism of the 1980s.

407

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The result was a swing toward the middle in American life that
influenced politics, domestic life, and social values. Hugh Hefners
embrace of family beautifully reflected this powerful social impulse,
but so too did the broad content of his magazine. Playboy, a cultural
flagship par excellence, embodied much of the new moderation as it
navigated into America s mainstream at the end of the century. Much
like Bill Clinton, the dynamic, youthful president elected in 1992 who
made this phrase a centerpiece of his campaign, Hefner and Playboy
reached out to enrich the lives of “those who work hard and play by
the rules.”

In 1988, the publisher and marketing director of Good Housekeeping
sat on a flight discussing their magazine and current social trends.
The upcoming decade, they mused, a new turn: after the upheavals of
the 1960s and 1970s, and the conservative yuppie materialism of the
1980s, the 1990s would see a return to family and home, yet in a fash-
ion that encouraged more flexible career goals, a greater sense of social
responsibility, and the pursuit of “quality” experiences and humane
values. By 1990, Good Housekeeping had launched a national adver-
tising campaign centered upon this “new traditionalism.” Proclaiming
a “decade of decency,” it portrayed Americans as striving to “look for
what is real, what is honest, what is quality, what is valued, what is
important.” Family Circle joined the parade. Its advertising campaign
of 1992 pictured cultural rebels coming full circle. Photos of young
women with diamond engagement rings through their noses, and of
young men sporting long hair, tattoos, and leather jackets while holding
a baby, appeared next to this slogan: “Lately, family values have been
showing up in the most unlikely places.” 2

These venerable magazines captured something essential in the
popular mood of fin de siecle America. Following the cultural earth-
quake of the Aquarian Age and the reactionary tsunami of the Reagan
years, many Americans indeed yearned to combine hearth and home
with personal liberation, social idealism with personal responsibil-
ity. Politically, this impulse helped sweep “New Democrat” Bill
Clinton, with his embrace of both a welfare state safety net and an
ethic of hard work and market competition, into the White House.

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409

Socially and culturally, it influenced the shaping of what the sociolo-
gist Alan Wolfe, in an insightful book of the same name, described as
“one nation, after all.” The vast majority of middle-class Americans,
Wolfe argued persuasively, had come to embrace a worldview that
lay between the extremes of 1960s revolution and 1980s reaction:
“an insistence on a set of values capacious enough to be inclusive but
demanding enough to uphold standards of personal responsibility.”
Weary of both hectoring fundamentalist preachers and victim-fixated
leftists, the mass of citizens had forged a pragmatic, centrist, nonideo-
logical, largely nonjudgmental consensus in the 1990s that sought to
reconcile tradition and diversity, religious belief and tolerance, family
and feminism, social obligation and personal fulfillment. 3

A clear indicator of Americas new traditionalism came in the
1994 release of Sex in America , a massive survey of sexual behavior
and values by a University of Chicago research team. The exhaustive
questioning of some thirty-four hundred subjects revealed that most
Americans, while their erotic horizons had broadened, still led con-
ventional sex lives. The vast majority of men and women lived happily
in a sexual universe dominated by “monogamy, marriage, and the
missionary position,” as Time observed. Fidelity trumped adultery,
monogamy trumped promiscuity, moderate rates of sexual inter-
course trumped orgies and abstinence, and marriage trumped the
single life. Most Americans, it seemed, had been jolted but not trans-
formed by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s, then sobered
but not converted by the antisexual piety of the Moral Majority in
the 1980s. While practicing and enjoying sex more than their pre-
decessors, modem Americans nonetheless did so largely within the
confines of traditional restraints. 4

Hefner and his magazine reacted ambivalently to this evidence of
American sexual conformity. “Our Puritan roots are deep,” Hefner
commented in Time. “Were fascinated by sex and afraid of it.” In
a private memo to Playboy editors, he contended that the survey
reflected the conservative prejudices and AIDS hysteria of the Reagan
era but, nonetheless, accepted the study’s core finding that “we are
conventional in our sex lives.” Playboy sniffed that the survey demon-
strated how many Americans “embrace conformity, the average. They
run screaming from excess, from experimentation.” But this impulse
overlooked evidence of “just how rich and diverse [American] sex is.”
Hefner added, “it is the diversity of our sexual behavior that is the

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real message.” This complex reaction suggested that Hefner and his
magazine, like most Americans, were trying to combine respect for
sexual tradition with enthusiasm for sexual innovation. 5

In fact, Hefners warm new family life appeared as a billboard
for Americas new traditionalism. The domestic aura of the Playboy
Mansion, as many observers noted, embodied an image “in sync with
the We Decade of the 1990s.” In the words of USA Today, “the trend
is marriage, monogamy, and moderation. Hefner was the symbol of
sexual freedom of the baby boomers. Now that generation is hit-
ting 40 and looking beyond transitory pleasures. Sexuality is not as
important. Hefner is finally joining the ranks.” 6

Playboy, beginning its fifth decade of publication, responded to
the spirit of the times. The magazine had become an institution.
“ Playboy has emerged as a survivor, rolling along with the chang-
ing social landscape,” noted the New York Daily News in 1993. But
survival depended on keen social and cultural instincts. Building
both upon its liberationist past and its occasional conservative over-
tures during the previous decade — admittedly, more sullen than
heartfelt — the magazine subtly positioned itself in the vanguard of
the new traditionalism. 7

Christie Hefner took the lead. She observed that as more of the
sixties generation (and Playboy subscribers) became parents, much
“focus in the 90s will be on the continuing evolution of the relation-
ship between men and women in a family environment.” The Playboy
enterprise needed to become an “adult Disney” focused on “home-
centered Baby Boomers,” and her father’s new lifestyle was a natural
fit. “Obviously, the Mansion is no longer bachelor heaven,” she wrote
in a 1992 memo. “Here’s a place where two people who’ve committed
themselves to each other, and are raising a family, live. . . . We need
some language that links personal dreams and individual freedom
and social responsibility ... to Hef’s personal life.” 8

Michael Perlis, hired as Playboy’s new publisher in 1990, joined
in. “I’m as mainstream as they come,” he told a media journal. Perlis
sought to distance Playboy even further from skin magazines and place
it among upscale competitors such as Esquire, Gentleman’s Quarterly,
Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated. He helped lure Volkswagen back
as an advertiser and sought new ads from Detroit automakers, men’s
fashion companies, and consumer electronics. Inside Media described
his agenda succinctly: “In short, re-mainstream Playboy.” 9

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A revised magazine gradually took shape. Many long-standing
elements remained in the 1990s as the Playboy Forum continued to
tackle controversial social issues and the Playboy Interview interro-
gated many of the most talked-about people in public life, including
comedian Jerry Seinfeld, filmmaker Spike Lee, political guru James
Carville, billionaire entrepreneur Bill Gates, sports star Shaquille
O’Neal, and writer Salman Rushdie. The magazine continued annual
features such as “Sex in Cinema,” college football and basketball prog-
nostications, and the Rock and Jazz poll, as well as the monthly Party
Jokes and surveys of fashion and the newest consumer items. Playboy’s
fictional offerings upheld the high standards of the past, with stories by
authors such as John Updike and Margaret Atwood, Jane Smiley and
William Kennedy, Joyce Carol Oates and Jay Mclnerney. It explored
the latest trends, such as the emergence of Generation X, the youthful
cadre that was filled with “antiboomer rage,” addicted to pop culture,
and given to an intensely ironic, despairing view of modern life. 10

Playboy’s erotic features also maintained its familiar mixture of
celebrity and the girl next door. Pictorials appeared on supermodels
Cindy Crawford and Elle Macpherson, actresses Sharon Stone and
Uma Thurman, and pop culture icons such as the spurious “Swedish
Bikini Team” and “The Babes of Baywatch” from the popular tele-
vision series. An unusually high number of Playmates in the 1990s
went on to fame and fortune: Anna Nicole Smith (May 1992), Jenny
McCarthy (October 1993), and Kelly Monaco (April 1997) among
them. Most notably, Playmate Pamela Anderson, Miss February
1990, became the leading sex symbol of the age. She quickly seized a
career in television and movies, had a much-publicized marriage with
rocker Tommy Lee, and appeared on the cover of Hefner’s magazine
eight times by the end of the decade.

For all of these familiar sights, however, Playboy slowly sidled up
to the new traditionalism in the 1990s. One of the first signals came
in its political orientation. Early in the decade, Hefners magazine main-
tained a muckraking, cynical liberalism rooted in the dissenting tradition
of the 1960s and 1970s. It ran a regular monthly political column by
the liberal analyst Robert Scheer, for example, and criticized Charles
Keatings savings and loan scandal. Hefner’s occasional political com-
mentaries underscored Playboy’s left-liberal stance. He condemned
the Republican Party for its “conservative agenda based on repres-
sion, prohibition, and retribution,” upheld the happy advance of

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sexual liberation, and insisted on the protection of personal freedom
and the First Amendment. 11

By mid-decade, however, Playboy became more apolitical. Its
stringent, leftist critiques of mainstream America disappeared and
pieces on public affairs increasingly were relegated to the Playboy
Forum, while Scheer’s column stopped running after the February
1996 issue. The magazine chose Leonard Maltin, a Disney movie
expert and regular critic on Entertainment Tonight , as Playboys film
reviewer in September 1998 to replace the retiring Bruce Williamson.
With Hefner settling down with marriage and children, the maga-
zine also nixed “World of Playboy,” a regular feature for years that
had highlighted exuberant social activities at the mansion. Overall,
Playboy increasingly returned to its 1950s roots as lifestyle, rela-
tionships, popular culture, and entertainment moved forward and
crowded leftist politics into the wings.

Trendy, let s-enjoy-life topics such as computer technology preoc-
cupied the magazine. With characteristic aplomb, Playboy covered the
arrival of the DVD (digital versatile disc), which promised to sweep
the field for video and computer use. It led readers through the diz-
zying maze of new gadgetry (cellular phones, portable fax machines,
voice-mail machines, pagers, laptop computers with modems), the
new electronic jargon (CD-BOM, DAT, Photo CD, VCR, Caller ID),
and the breathtaking possibilities of the Internet. 12

Typically, the magazine translated popular fascination with comput-
ers into the language of sex. Several nude pictorials of female enthu-
siasts surpassed the fantasies of any computer geek hunched over his
PC keyboard in some dark cubbyhole. “The moment we asked the
women of the Net to reveal themselves, sexy GIFs and JPEGs poured
into our digital mailbox from around the world,” noted “Women of
the Internet” in April 1996. That same issue highlighted Miss April,
Gillian Bonner, who had founded her own software development
company and “hopes someday to create digital erotic fantasies that
are more explicit and expansive.” 13

Playboy s neotraditionalism appeared even more clearly in its
approach to relationships between men and women. In 1991, the
magazine joined with Roper to conduct a survey of the modern male,
his values, and his attitudes, and released the findings early the next
year. The Playboy/Roper “Man Track” study indicated that men
increasingly sought to combine traditional masculine impulses with

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an enhanced awareness of womens needs and family responsibilities.
They wanted to be perceived as sensitive and caring, yet remained
very interested in work, sports, and sex. They sought an armistice in
the war between the sexes and better communication with women.
In response, Playboy launched “Mantrack: A Guys Guide to Changing
Times,” a new monthly feature that charted this new sensibility. The
first installment examined the surprising extent of male-female agree-
ment on issues such as date rape and sexual harassment. It then noted
that men were caught between the demands of work and the desire
for more leisure time, but most of them valued labor over play. It
reported that “the man of the Nineties may be getting sensitive” as
males from eighteen to forty-four ranked the top three criteria for a
good relationship in the following order: love, a good sexual relation-
ship, the ability to talk about feelings. 14

Playboy worked to define modern maleness throughout the 1990s.
A new monthly column by Asa Baber discussed the many quandaries
facing men and defended them against feminist attacks. “Whenever
you hear masculinity defined as innately deadly and brutal, remind
yourself that most of us are truly good men,” he said. “We love our
families, work hard to protect them, cherish our children, and live
honorably.” The magazine offered advice on manly endeavors, includ-
ing a tongue-in-cheek take on how to create an image as a rugged
outdoor type. An impression of mountain biking expertise demanded
familiarity with the technology of the sport but “don’t mention any-
thing about the bike’s basket or its cute little bell.” With caving, the
macho poseur should casually note his fearless physical endurance
and remember that “stalactites pierce your noggin; stalagmites look
like the award they give the Proctologist of the Year.” 15

Playboy revised its traditional instruction to men about attracting
and seducing women, now stressing the need for understanding the
complex relationship between the sexes. Moreover, in a break with
its past, much of this advice now came from women. Clarissa Pinkola
Estes, author of the best-selling Women Who Run with the Wolves:
Myths and Stones of the Wild Woman Archetype, gave pointers on
how to understand essential feminine inclinations, desires, and values.
Julie Rigby critiqued women’s talk shows on daytime TV to give read-
ers the inside scoop on how, in the world of Oprah and Sally Jessy,
a man was “dressed down as a bad-smelling, bed-hogging, money-
wasting, two-timing bozo who doesn’t deserve to be trusted.” In an

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essay on the rules of “postmodern romance,” Tracey Pepper focused
on practical guidelines for conversation, apparel, second dates, the
goodnight kiss, and sexual etiquette. Some basic rules: “Have a car,
don’t live with your parents, don’t get shitfaced, wear underwear,
and don’t have an ass that is smaller than your date’s.” 16

The new traditionalist male inspired a huge advertising and mar-
keting campaign for the magazine in the latter half of the 1990s.
Taking the old slogan, “What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?” the ads
presented modern Playboy readers as educated, computer-sawy,
healthy and active, well groomed, and interested in leisure endeavors
such as cars, vacations, good restaurants, stylish clothes, sports, travel,
and romance. As one ad put it, “He works hard during the week and
takes his weekend fun seriously.” While the series portrayed men
with attractive young women as they stood on a yacht or sat at a casino
gambling table, they also stressed their commitment to relationships.
“Last week he booked an entire restaurant for his girlfriend’s birth-
day,” said one. “He’s a man who knows how to celebrate romance,”
said another. “For Valentine’s Day he booked the executive suite and
ordered roses and vintage champagne before he proposed.” 17

Thus Hefner and his magazine engaged the neotraditionalist male
who had emerged from the maelstrom of Aquarian Age revolution
and Reaganite reaction. Even more strikingly, Playboy jumped into
the so-called “culture wars” of the 1990s as an enthusiastic combat-
ant against political correctness. Just as it had opposed the moralistic
pieties of the Religious Right, it now opposed the cultural pieties
of the Radical Left with its unforgiving demands for PC behavior.
Playboy and Hefner, drawing upon many of their long-standing
principles, articulated a libertarian progressivism in the 1990s that
stressed the greatest possible personal freedom within the boundar-
ies of tradition.

Early in the decade, Playboy walked a treacherous political tight-
rope. On one side loomed the conservative forces of the Moral
Majority, with whom Hefner and his magazine continued to battle.
The Reverend Donald Wildmon, for example, an old enemy from the
1980s, persisted in conducting a campaign that persuaded companies

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such as ABC, Pepsi, Honda, and Chrysler to stop advertising in
Playboy. Hefner, mocking the evangelical activist as the “American
Ayatollah,” sustained opposition through a direct-mail campaign to
advertising executives, support for First Amendment pressure groups
such as People for the American Way, and an eventual lawsuit against
Wildmon. 18

On the other side appeared the leftist forces of political correct-
ness, who loathed Playboy for its attitude toward women. By the early
1990s, they had captured many college campuses, media centers, and
even some corporate headquarters, creating a welter of elaborate reg-
ulations governing sexual actions and offensive speech against women
and minorities. Hefner also battled this censorious spirit, condemn-
ing speech codes and sex regulations as repressive, even authoritar-
ian, violations of free speech. The infamous “Sexual Offense Policy”
of Antioch College, for instance, which mandated that every step of
sexual intimacy — kissing, touching the breasts, touching the genitals,
intercourse — required separate, clear verbal consent, at the risk of
expulsion, drew his ire. “I see this whole politically correct phenom-
enon as a new form of Puritanism,” he declared. “The notion that
women are always victims and men are always predators and need
‘guidelines’ issued to them so they need to know how to behave on a
date seems to me to be very much the opposite of liberation.” 19

Entering the emotional “culture wars” that exploded between
these ideological opposites in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hefner
and Playboy sought a third way. This effort had a model. In the politi-
cal realm, President Bill Clinton pursued a “New Democrat” strategy
of “triangulation” that sought to synthesize elements of Democratic
welfare-state regulation with Republican principles of free-market
individualism while distancing itself from hard-liners in both camps.
In the cultural realm, Hefner and his advisers shaped a similar strat-
egy that sought a middle way between disciples of the Moral Majority
and zealots of the Radical Left. The result was a cultural centrism that
was equal parts progressive reform, libertarian freedom, and consum-
erist prosperity. 20

A clear indicator of Playboy ’ s cultural triangulation appeared in
its January 1992 special section devoted to analyzing the decade just
under way. “Wake Up and Smell the Nineties” humorously pilloried
the previous era as one of conservative greed and corruption. Cringing
at “the appalling decade that just ended,” it listed the assaults that

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came from Ronald Reagan, James Watt, federal deficits, supply-side
economists, Ivan Roesky, junk bonds, T. Roone Pickens, and the Fox
network (for good measure, it also threw in “nine Rarbara Mandrell
comebacks, 243 John Candy movies, and Regis Philbin”). Items to
be thrown out in a “Nineties Garage Sale” included fur coats, gran-
ite desk accessories, and The Art of the Deal , by Donald Trump.
“The nicest thing about the Nineties will be how little they resemble
the Eighties,” it concluded. 21

Right next to this conservative-skewering piece sat “Navigating
the Nineties: The PC. Survival Guide,” which turned in the opposite
direction to mock the priggish pieties of cultural leftists. It instructed
readers on the politically correct answers to a farcical multiple-choice
quiz. On how to pick up Cindy Crawford in a bar: “I think together
we could both reach our full sexual potential, but only if you think it’s
still possible for two people to celebrate their gender diversity without
oppression or subsuming their individuality.” On how to act at a mens
movement gathering: “Cursing your father, weeping copiously around
a campfire, admitting you have tiny genitals, and then beating your
hairless chest.” How to address females (all are correct): “a) women
b) wimmin c) vagino-Americans.” Political correctness, Playboy
instructed, demanded an excruciating sensitivity to oppression and
victimization. “Never allow yourself to enjoy the moment without
being fully cognizant of the sorrow that lurks around the corner.” 22

The spirit of cultural triangulation guided the magazine throughout
the 1990s. Playboy regularly attacked conservative extremism. It pil-
loried Pat Ruchanan s run for the White House in 1996 as a religious
crusade of paranoid reactionaries and denounced Pat Robertson for
leading an army of evangelical Christians in an attempted takeover
of the country’s political institutions. It followed Timothy McVeighs
twisted ideological journey among right-wing fanatics that led him to
the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. It offered
a stinging critique of the conservative campaign to teach creationism
in schools, deeming it an anti-intellectual crusade of the ignorant and
the malevolent. 23

Just as frequently, Playboy rejected demands for politically cor-
rect attitudes and speech. In 1992, it challenged the multicultural
bashing of Columbus as a “dead white male” on the five hundredth
anniversary of the European discovery of America. A few years
later, the magazine angrily disputed the racially charged verdict in

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the O. J. Simpson trial. Playboy’s resistance to political correctness
frequently focused on college campuses. It denounced the fad for
speech codes, with their ban on “offensive” language, and mocked
the broader movement to impose attitudes about gender, race, sexual
orientation, and social class. In 1995 it surveyed college students’ atti-
tudes and portrayed “a fearful student body blindly marching under
the banner of PC.” College used to be a place where students freely
exchanged ideas and learned to think for themselves, the magazine
asserted, but now they “sought safety in numbers and regulations,
and sidestepped confrontation and hurt feelings.” A close examination
of the rancorous debate over a proposed faculty-student sex code at
the University of Virginia prompted the conclusion that schools had
become training grounds where “the politically correct theorists of
righteousness put ever-finer points on their blue pencils.” 24

Hefner and Playboy upheld libertarian principles. The magazine
defended the right of artistic freedom in the uproar over the work
of the controversial artist Robert Mapplethorpe in 1991. When an
exhibit of his photographs, which featured graphic sexual images and
irreligious themes, brought a prosecution for obscenity in Cincinnati,
Playboy praised an innocent verdict for protecting constitutional
rights: “In the end it wasn’t easy. If freedom were easy, the whole
world would be doing it.” In an interview with the Advocate, a gay
rights magazine, Hefner admitted to some bisexual experiences as
part of the swinging scene at the Playboy Mansion in the 1970s and
argued that homosexuality should not be stigmatized. In his words,
“I don’t think heterosexuality should preclude you from trying what-
ever’s out there.” This libertarian stress on protection of personal
freedom, opposition to government regulation, and respect for the
rights of minority groups defined an important part of the Playboy
political perspective in the 1990s. 25

Not surprisingly, one of Playboy’s major culture-war battlefields
appeared on the terrain of women’s issues. On the one hand, the
magazine continued fighting pro-censorship, antipom feminists such
as Catharine MacKinnon. “Radical feminism is her gospel, the law is
her weapon,” noted one piece, and she “won’t stop until your libido
is behind bars.” A report on a 1993 feminist legal conference at the
University of Chicago characterized it as a “hatefest” where partici-
pants wore buttons saying “So Many Men, So Little Ammunition,”
vied with one another to berate males as predators, abusers, and

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rapists, and, finally, celebrated Andrea Dworkin s concluding talk by
angrily rushing the stage to shred into confetti Madonnas recently
published book Sex. Playboy opposed “victimization” advocates, such
as Susan F aludi in her best-selling book Backlash: The Undeclared
War Against American Women. It argued that she twisted statistics,
chose evidence selectively, and ignored the fact that many womens
financial problems were not the result of a male plot but the product
of the troubled economy of the 1980s. For Playboy, the danger lay
in extremists on both sides — “self-appointed demagogues like Pat
Buchanan and Susan Faludi.” 26

At the same time, Playboy made common cause with moderate
advocates of womens rights. It endorsed what the author Christina
Hoff Sommers termed “equity feminism.” As opposed to “gender fem-
inism,” which sought to rescue female victims from male patriarchy,
equity feminists stressed equal access to jobs, equality under the law,
and nondiscriminatory treatment for women. This formed the heart
of Hefner and Playboy’s agenda for womens rights in the 1990s. The
magazine presented sympathetic interviews with equity feminists who
criticized their radical sisters for adopting nineteenth-century atti-
tudes about womens sexual victimization and moral superiority, using
patriarchy to fuel a war between the sexes, creating a hysteria over
date rape that made men wholly responsible for sexual encounters,
and pressuring the courts to demonize men in divorce settlements.
Warren Farrell, a disillusioned former board member of the New
York chapter of NOW, wrote articles arguing that gender feminism
distorted the male character and ignored the pressures facing men. It
ran an editorial from the critic Katie Roiphe, who denounced radical
feminists as neo-Victorians whose ideology “infantilizes women. . . .
Lets not reinforce the images that oppress us, that label us victims,
and deny our own agency and intelligence as strong and sensual, as
autonomous, pleasure-seeking, sexual beings.” 27

In fact, Hefner established a relationship with two of the most
influential, controversial figures in 1990s feminism. First, he effected
a rapprochement with Betty Friedan, the pioneering figure who
had inspired the postwar women’s movement with The Feminine
Mystique (1963) before breaking with radical gender feminists in the
1980s. Playboy successfully engaged her for the Playboy Interview in
September 1992, where it praised her “moderate brand of feminism”
for pursuing “equal opportunities for women, equal pay for equal

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work, better child care, better health care, and more.” During the
discussion, Friedan condemned making women into sex objects, but
added, “I definitely don’t think feminism needs to be equated with
Puritanism and the denial of sexuality.” She insisted on the sanctity
of free speech, opposed MacKinnon- Dworkin style legislation against
pornography, and opposed a patriarchy paradigm for the womens
rights movement. “If men and women don’t face these things [sexism,
inequality] together, nothing will change,” she argued. Friedan was
adamant that the movement must rid itself of any antifamily bias,
declaring, “You want a feminism that includes women who have chil-
dren and want children because that’s the majority of women.” When
such positions led many gender feminists to denounce her, she admit-
ted, “I’m not going to lie. I’m very hurt when I feel trashed by the
leaders of the organizations I helped to start.” 28

Around the same time, Friedan interviewed Hefner for her book
Fountain of Age (1993), which attempted to combat the debilitating
mystique of aging. Old age, she contended, needed to be seen as a
unique stage of life with its own benefits and opportunities rather
than as a decline from youth. Hefner, with his second marriage and
family, seemed to embody “the new adventure of generativity” for
older people. “I started looking for a more traditional one-to-one
commitment instead of the Playboy lifestyle,” he told her. “It took
me a long time to get there, but what gives me the most satisfaction
now, strangely enough, is my relationship with my wife and my kids.”
In 1995, Friedan even published an article in Playboy titled “Why
Men Die Young.” It encouraged men to disengage from the careerist
rat race and embrace the new emotional opportunities offered by
the revolution in women’s rights. And women needed to give gender
a rest. “Men will live longer when women are strong enough to real-
ize that they don’t need men as scapegoats anymore,” Friedan con-
cluded. “We need you, and you need us more than ever.” 29

The magazine also inked an alliance with Camille Paglia, the femi-
nist enfant terrible who burst on the national scene in the early 1990s.
With an incendiary style and a best-selling book, Sexual Personae: Art
and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), she lam-
basted victimization feminism and upheld an ideal of female choice
and independence. In a pair of articles and a Playboy Interview, this
outspoken intellectual dropped bomb after rhetorical bomb on modem
gender feminism. While supporting a social agenda of “full political,

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legal, and social equality for all women,” Paglia derided speech-code
advocates as “thought police” and described MacKinnon and Dworkin
as “victim-mongers, ambulance chasers, atrocity addicts.” Playboy
centerfolds, she maintained, were “very sensuous and very physical,”
and gender feminists who opposed them simply failed to understand
the nature of human sexuality. “Pornography is about lust, our ani-
mal reality that will never be fully tamed by love. Lust is elemental,
aggressive, asocial,” Paglia asserted. In a take-no-prisoners style, she
condemned the modern womens movement for neglecting women
who wanted to stay at home, abandoning children, and fomenting
a destructive war between the sexes. When some activists branded
her a traitor, Paglia blamed her ostracism on a feminist establish-
ment that feared reform. “Feminism has betrayed women, alienated
men, replaced dialogue with political correctness. PC feminism has
boxed women in,” she asserted. Paglia believed that women needed a
bracing agenda of individual responsibility, appreciation for biological
differences, tough-minded assertiveness, and vibrant sexuality. “Lets
get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorex-
ics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors,” she
declared. “Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where
bunches of clingy slob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.” 30
Playboy’s 1990 s erotic pictorials subtly promoted equity feminism
and the new traditionalism. Their subjects increasingly appeared
as liberated women for whom sex, family, and personal goals were
equally important. As one Playmate confessed, “I used to be a wild
and crazy girl. I’m not so wild and crazy anymore. I want to get mar-
ried. I want to have a baby. Marriage comes first, I guess.” Miss
October 1995 was a serious student and model who saw no conflict
between the two. “Meet the postmodern Playmate. She paints. She
reads philosophy. She ponders the meaning of life, the meaning of
sex, even the socio-politics of appearing in Playboy .” A special picto-
rial titled “Domestic Bliss” presented housewives and mothers whose
physical attractions rivaled their domestic devotion. “I think it’s great
that Playboy has decided to pay tribute to all the moms out there
who aren’t actresses, models, or famous — just women who are doing
great jobs raising their families, yet haven’t lost sight of their indi-
viduality, femininity, and sensuality,” wrote one. As the magazine
concluded, “A woman’s place in the Nineties is wherever she wants
it to be.” 31

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As it negotiated the tricky terrain of male-female relationships
in the 1990s, Playboy endorsed a modern code of sexual values that
was liberated yet responsible, pleasure-seeking yet non-exploitative,
vigorous yet playful, innovative yet respectful of tradition. Its ten-
part “History of the Sexual Revolution” acclaimed the twentieth-
century triumph of those who embraced sex as “a form of enthusiasm,
a playground, a wellspring of intimacy, chuckles, and ecstasy,” and
celebrated the defeat of those who upheld a “single, sacred model
of sex: that of intercourse within marriage.” Playboy endorsed the
advance of womens rights and tutored men on faux pas in language
and behavior. It offered enlightened common sense: “If you don’t
want your love life to be a war, stop seeing women as conquests.
Because if it comes to a war, you’ll be the loser. History is not on your
side. . . . And women’s equality is the cause of every man who truly
loves women.” 32

The ultimate expression of Hefner and Playboy’s new tradition-
alist sexual ethic may have appeared in an article titled “Sex Is
Back.” Sexual vitality had returned to American life following a long
dry spell of restriction and AIDS fear in the age of Reagan, it asserted.
The lesson drawn from this trend, however, marked a fascinating evo-
lution in the nation’s most famous proponent of erotic recreation.

The thing of value is not the sex itself but all that sex carries
with it: the companionship, the intimacy, the defeat of loneli-
ness that otherwise gets us all.

That old-fashioned kind of sex, the kind that is part of a pri-
vate and mostly wonderful thing between two people, is what
everyone I talked to . . . seemed desperately to want these
days. Boyfriends are back. Girlfriends are back. Marriage is
back. Even babies, nature’s intended result of all this sex, are
most emphatically back. . . . What we are looking for is love.

A man who had run the gamut of sexual adventure voiced the
article’s poignant conclusion. “I want to settle down. I tried to have
open relationships, but I found ... it was painful to all involved,”
he noted. “There was a kind of empty feeling there all along, like,
Geez, this is fun but what am I going to do when I’m forty-five with
no family and I’m just a lecherous old asshole?” 33

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Hefners public statements reinforced Playboy’s independent
progressivism. Throughout the 1990s, he denounced both the rigid
moralism of fundamentalist conservatives and the antisexual bent of
political correctness as “a new form of Prohibition.” In a special 1996
editorial, he maintained that both “Victorian repression and colonial-
ism” were disappearing while global communication and trade were
increasing. In this new world, the American dream held forth great
possibilities: “the dream of personal, political, and economic free-
dom. It is the dream this magazine was founded upon.” 34

As they advocated a third way between conservatism and politi-
cally correct liberalism, Hefner and Playboy made common cause
with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. When his sexual escapades
ignited controversy, he became a cause celebre in the magazine.
During the 1992 election, when rumors of sexual peccadilloes were
swirling, Playboy advised him to acknowledge his sexual vitality,
point to other presidents who had strayed such as Franklin Roosevelt
and John Kennedy, and say, “Fve lived a full-blooded life. So far as
I know, no one got hurt and I was always careful to use a condom,
and I urge others, when the need calls, to do the same.” A few years
later, it praised Clinton as a kind of middle-class everyman who of
all presidents was “the most like you and me.” When the Monica
Lewinsky scandal exploded, the magazine scoffed at the feverish pub-
licity surrounding it, but chastised Clinton for his reckless indiscre-
tion in conducting the affair. Hefner rushed to defend “The Playboy
President,” as he termed him in a special May 1998 editorial. Against
the backdrop of a revised presidential seal that featured the rabbit
head logo, the publisher defended Clinton as a symbol of sexual free-
dom against the “puritan mob” out to get him. Widespread public
support for the president, he argued, suggested “we have at last come
of age. We do not expect our leaders to be the stuff of McGujfey’s
Readers As Hefner concluded, “We are human. We are sexual. Now
lets get on with life.” 35

In no small way, Playboy’s articulation of the new traditionalism
and its appeals to the moderate mainstream was eased by the financial
stabilization of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. After nearly going under
in the 1980s, the company, under the leadership of Christie Hefner,
slowly rebuilt itself on solid, if less expansive, ground during the
following decade.

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423

III

In September 1988, two months after his engagement to Kimberly
Conrad, Hugh Hefner stepped down as chairman and chief executive
of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. Although he planned to stay involved in
“major strategic decisions,” as he termed it, Christie Hefner would
assume control of the company. She had his full confidence, the pub-
lisher stressed, because of her successful direction of “a restructuring
program that has resulted in an overall return to profitability.” 36
A year later, Christie Hefner made another big change. She
announced that PEI would leave its ten-floor abode in the Playboy
Building on Michigan Avenue, where it had resided for the past twenty
years. The new, smaller headquarters in a Lake Shore Drive office
building was unveiled at an open house in January 1990. “The move
is not simply a face-lift for the company,” Christie said. “It reflects our
new direction.” But the shift to a less expensive site also saved millions
of dollars in yearly expenses. It indicated the new downsized, focused,
mainstreaming orientation coming to the fore in Hefners company. 37

The younger Hefner had spent much of the 1980s struggling to
recover from the financial debacle of the casino crashes early in the
decade as she cut unprofitable activities, eliminated debt, and stock-
piled cash. Now she was determined to move the company into the
black in the 1990s. Slowly but surely, PEI reestablished its financial
stability over the new decade as Christie, with her father’s encourage-
ment, refocused the enterprise on entertainment and communica-
tions. “We’ve spent a lot of time straightening out where the company
ought to be,” she declared. “But my becoming CEO marks the com-
ing of a new era — an era of growth.” 38

Christie moved on several fronts. She brought on board a new
management team, hiring Michael Perlis, from Bodale Press, as pub-
lisher, James Spanfeller of Newsweek as associate publisher and head
of marketing, Steve Cohen as chief of communications and promo-
tions, and Chiat/Day/Mojo as a new advertising agency. They tried
to refocus the Playboy appeal for a broader, mainstream audience.
According to the company’s new catchphrase, the Playboy product
was “quality fun for grown-ups.” 39

The new master plan focused PEI’s energies into four areas: pub-
lishing ( Playboy magazine and other smaller projects), entertainment

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MR. PLAYBOY

(video and television), product marketing (licensing deals), and
catalog sales. This array of products and creations, the company
hoped, would promote a modern Playboy lifestyle associated with
tasteful “consumer sexiness.” In Christie’s words, it was “sexy but not
sexually explicit.” With regard to expansion, PEI would acquire only
bargain-price properties and seek investment partners to share the
financial burden. 40

This overall approach inspired PEI to purchase the duPont
Registry, a guide for buying and selling elite cars; Sarah Coventry,
a company that featured inexpensive but fashionable jewelry and
accessories; and the Critics Choice home video catalog. Searching
for a successful formula to strengthen the Playboy Channel — it had
been opposed by local fundamentalist groups, but also dropped by
many subscribers when they discovered that explicit sex has been
deleted from its erotic movies — a pay-per-view format was adopted.
PEI also made a strong move into global markets with new foreign
editions of Playboy and a wide variety of licensed products, videos,
and pay-per-view. In order to take advantage of advancing telecom-
munications technology, the company expanded into electronic pub-
lishing and sales, opening a free Web site in 1994, a Cyber Club and
online Playboy Store in 1997, and a partnership with K-Tel to create
an online music store. 41

Hugh Hefner provided bedrock support for his daughter as she
labored to construct a sturdy business structure for the company. He
placed great confidence in her business judgment and endorsed her
strategy for focused, controlled diversification of PEI. “We have a
wonderful partnership,” he declared publicly. “Our views and values
are just about identical.” When pressed about who was really in
charge, he claimed, “She’s working for me. I’m the guy that owns the
company.” But he never rejected any of his daughter’s projects and
happily settled for monthly business updates from her 42

But the process of recovery was slow and difficult in the early
1990s. Publishing and television sectors lost money, while younger
consumers remained a tough sell, since the magazine’s average reader
was a thirty-three-year-old, often married, with an above-average
income. In 1993, PEI was forced to reduce overhead costs by elimi-
nating 10 percent of its workforce. Around the same time, after only
a few years on the job, publisher Michael Perlis left to take a position
with Conde Nast Publications. PEI’s fluctuating net income revealed

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425

its difficulties in achieving consistent gains and growth. It climbed
into the black by 1991, but then things turned sour, with profits falling
deeply into the red by 1994. At mid-decade, the company appeared
to be stagnating. 43

In the latter half of the 1990s, however, PEI’s financial picture
brightened. It teamed up with a consortium of Greek investors to
build a $40 million casino on the isle of Rhodes and purchased Spice
Entertainment, a cluster of adult television channels, for $95 million,
giving it a monopoly on the adult pay-per-view TV market. It also
reached out to women, establishing female-oriented Web sites for
marketing, pushing a womens apparel line with the rabbit logo, and
developing cable programs that featured couples acting out fantasies.
Money came in, with PEI posting profits from 1995 to 1999. 44

Overall, PEI found a measure of financial success, albeit on a
smaller and more restricted scale, by the end of the decade. Thus
a fin de siecle stability characterized the company, the magazine,
and the founder as they made peace with neotraditionalist America.
Hugh Hefner seemed the picture of contentment. Freed of economic
worry and savoring the secure position of his enterprise, he enjoyed
a warm domestic life with a beautiful young wife and two adorable
sons. A long magazine piece summed up his late-life transformation:
“Happily married and settled right down, he seems to be in the van-
guard of another new morality which seeks to shore up home and
family against the vagaries of the millennium.” Upon reaching age
seventy, Hefner seemed to be watching the movie of his life come to
its final reel with the kind of romantic ending he treasured 45

But appearances deceived. In December 1997, the very time
when the laudatory magazine article appeared, the secure, comfort-
able world he had created over the last decade crumbled. Distraught
and thrown off stride, an aging Mr. Playboy was forced to reinvent
himself a final time.

Back in the Game

O n December 31, 1997, Hugh Hefner hosted his traditional
New Years Eve party at the Playboy Mansion for several hun-
dred friends, celebrities, and other guests. But things didn’t
go as planned. Quite unexpectedly — the tables had already been
set with nameplates positioned at the head table for the host and his
wife — the publisher appeared alone at his own gala. Guests were told
that Kimberly Hefner was ill with the flu. In truth, however, she had
decided at the last moment to go to Hawaii with their two children.
As the attendees watched, the embarrassed Playboy publisher walked
from table to table and greeted guests with a stiff smile. The usual
merrymaking occurred, but a palpable sense of tension colored the
atmosphere. 1

A few weeks later, the Hefners publicly aired their private prob-
lems. On January 20, 1998, they announced a trial separation, citing
“separate interests” and stressing that they remained devoted to their
two children, Marston, seven, and Cooper, six, who would live with
their mother in a house adjoining the Playboy Mansion that Hefner
had purchased two years earlier. Both parties held out hope for
reconciliation. Kimberly mused, “Maybe we will be able to recapture

426

BACK IN THE GAME

427

what we lost,” and Hefner added, “Sometimes you don’t know how
important a thing is to you until it isn’t there.” 2

Fate, it seemed, had intervened. Back in 1989, a visiting journalist
had described the newlyweds as living in a fantasy world where the
young wife served as her older husband’s “magic talisman,” warding
off attacks of age and fading charm. It seemed too good to be true,
and the writer warned, “Perhaps reality will one day intrude upon this
fantastic existence.” Indeed, within a few years reality triumphed over
fantasy. The legendary lothario, who had embraced the traditional
pleasures of marriage and family, suddenly found his life in disarray.
The centrifugal force of coming full circle to a more orthodox lifestyle
flung Hefner out of his comfortable cocoon of security at age seventy-
one. He was devastated. 3

By the mid-1990s, regulars at the Playboy Mansion noticed subtle
signs of trouble. Kimberly often failed to attend the weekend screen-
ings of movies or, if she did, frequently got up and left. At the weekly
buffet dinners, Hefner sat at the head table flanked by his old friends
while his wife sat at a round table off to the side in a bay window,
surrounded by a bevy of her companions. When Hefner kissed his
wife publicly, it was usually on the forehead. Kimberly increasingly
appeared ill at ease or distracted, while her husband seemed dispirited.
In 1995, Dick and Anne Stewart, who had moved away to Phoenix,
inquired about the tension in a letter. “Are you two lovers still getting
along?” they wrote. “I heard word of a spat or two. Mustn’t let it faze
you as the road to paradise is full of chuck-holes.” 4

Problems had been brewing since early in the decade. For the
first few years of marriage, the relationship had flourished, but after
the birth of their second son the couple had begun drifting apart
over issues of incompatibility and conflicting interests. Kimberly,
especially, grew unhappy with the marriage and her life at the man-
sion. While adamantly refusing to discuss the reasons for the marital
breakup, she has dropped hints about the causes of her discontent. 5

Her husband’s rigid schedule seems to have been one source
of unhappiness. Hefner had established a routine at the mansion
over the previous twenty years that remained nearly impervious to

428

MR. PLAYBOY

change: showing movies with buffets and guests on Friday, Saturday,
and Sunday evenings; dinner and a movie with male friends on
Monday evenings “Manly Night”; cards with his old Chicago cro-
nies on Wednesday evenings; and an assortment of games and activi-
ties at other scheduled times. Kimberly began to find this structure
oppressive, telling one interviewer not long after the separation, “It
was the same thing every night for ten years. Sometimes I wanted
for us not to have plans. Once in a while, it would Ve been nice for
him to say, ‘Lets just call and tell everyone not to come on Friday
night and have a quiet dinner together and go to a piano bar or
something.’” An active young woman, she liked going to bed at a
reasonable hour, getting up early to work out and engage in vari-
ous pursuits. Hefner, a creature of habit, liked to stay home, enjoy
his friends in a dependably arranged setting, and watch old movies.
As Mark Saginor, Hefner’s close friend, explained, “Kimberly wanted
to do more things outside the Mansion grounds, and Hef has never
been one to leave his property — it’s his personal Shangri-La. That’s
the major problem.” 6

Kimberly, a private person, also grew weary of living in the fishbowl
atmosphere of the Playboy Mansion. As the mistress of this legendary
establishment, every week she faced dozens of people who observed
her every move. Most of the mansion regulars had known her hus-
band for years, and while she became close friends with some of them,
others indulged in court gossip, backbiting, and jockeying for position
that left her feeling vulnerable and uncomfortable. “People really
watch. When we were going t hrough our downswing — all marriages
go through ups and downs, and we’ve been going through a down for
the last year — people had a tendency to treat me differently,” she said
in 1994. Kimberly, especially with the arrival of children, desperately
desired a family home marked by privacy and a few close friends.
“Sometimes you want to go downstairs and have quiet, as opposed to
running into 50 people,” she complained to another journalist. Her
frustration sometimes produced heavy-handed maneuvers, such as the
sign posted prominently in the staff center near the kitchen: “When
mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” Years later, Kimberly admit-
ted that her inexperience probably led to missteps, and lamented
the lack of a seasoned adviser. As her husband defended the social
traditions of the mansion, friction mounted and she came to feel, with
some bitterness, that he favored his friends over his family. 7

BACK IN THE GAME

429

Finally, Kimberly grew resentful about having to adapt completely
to her husband’s lifestyle. A vibrant young woman in her twenties and
early thirties, an age when people tend to shape their adult identities,
she chafed at the restraints imposed by Hefners routine. “The truth
of it became how I fit into his life. And I was lonely,” she said, before
comparing herself to another young wife thwarted by tradition. “It
was like Lady Di. She also married young to a famous man set in
his ways. You think or hope, at least, that you can change him. But
sometimes its impossible.” For her, it became an issue of power in
the marriage. “Hef has had a lot of control over me. But I’m breaking
away from that,” she asserted at mid-decade. Ultimately, Kimberly
found it difficult to shape a viable identity within the parameters
of the life, the home, and the activities established by her celebrity
husband . 8

Hefner viewed the growing marital discord in an entirely differ-
ent light. Initially confounded by his young wife’s increasing unhap-
piness, he struggled to understand it before gradually becoming
exasperated and defensive. As Kimberly’s complaints mounted, he
came to believe that she harbored deep-seated emotional insecurities
that led her to resent having to stand in his shadow. She was beset by
“low self-esteem,” in his estimation, which led her to begrudge the
attention he received. “No matter what I did, she had some resent-
ment of me,” he contended. “Her actions would say, ‘Look at me!
Look at me!”’ Hefner also concluded that his wife suffered from
postpartum depression after the birth of their second child, which
reinforced her insecurity and nourished a kind of paranoia. When
she entered a room during a mansion social event, he observed, she
immediately suspected that people conversing at a table were talking
critically about her . 9

He felt aggrieved by Kimberly’s pressure to alter his weekly activi-
ties. “Before the marriage, one of the things I told her was ‘I don’t
want my life to change.’ She agreed, and then exactly the opposite
happened,” he complained later. He found her continuous goading to
cancel movie nights, thin out the social events, and prune the guest
list to be tremendously irritating since these features had contrib-
uted greatly to his happiness for many years. Hefner believed that
they should be able to have both family closeness and the routine
of friends, movies, and parties that he had come to cherish. He also
began to see a power struggle emerging in the relationship. As he said

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MR. PLAYBOY

of her demands, “ That isn’t love. That isn’t even wanting to spend
time with a person. That’s a power play. The reality is, I wouldn’t
be spending time with her anyway. I’d be alone. She would be busy
doing her own things.” 10

Emotional incompatibility became an issue for Hefner. Romantic,
sentimental, and affectionate, he found his wife, as she settled into
the marriage, to be reserved, even aloof. An emotional chasm opened
between them. In love with the idea of marriage, children, and
domestic contentment, the publisher overlooked veiy real problems
and could not understand his wife’s growing impatience. He became
distraught when she quit having sex with him by the mid-1990s, but
even then he was willing to soldier on. The separation was her idea,
he stressed, and insisted that “the primary reason the marriage failed”
was that she was not suited to it. 11

Finally, a truly toxic factor poisoned the relationship for
Hefner. Not long after the birth of their second son, his wife had
an affair with a mansion security guard. When he confronted her after
observing some suspicious behavior, she confessed immediately and
agreed to end the tryst. But another one followed, he asserts. Rumors
of Kimberly’s infidelities ran rampant among mansion regulars and
staff although, of course, they were never talked about openly. Hefner,
who insists that he remained faithful throughout the marriage, was
devastated. While sensitive to the irony of the situation — the playboy
who had clipped his own wings, only to be cuckolded by his mate — he
felt a sense of betrayal that dredged up bitter memories of Millie’s
affair many years earlier before his first marriage. In an attempt to
repair their frayed marriage, the couple sought marital counseling on
and off for several years but with little success. 12

In the summer of 1995, a move toward dissolution came when
Hefner purchased the house adjoining the Playboy Mansion — it
was a smaller version of the legendary residence — as a sanctuary for
Kimberly. The abode facilitated a kind of pseudo-separation. She
spent increasing amounts of time there, and with unresolved issues
festering, the marriage continued to decay. By the summer of 1997 the
situation had grown acute as Kimberly pulled away both physically and
emotionally and her husband went through cycles of despair, anger,
and fear for the future. When the final break came with the deba-
cle at the 1997 New Year’s Eve party, it was almost a relief for all
concerned. 13

BACK IN THE GAME

431

Emotionally bruised by the ordeal, Hefner retreated to his old
belief that marriage is the death of romance. His experience with
Kimberly reaffirmed that the promise of matrimony was greater than
the actuality. “What I didn’t foresee was how much, when you fall in
love, you project your own needs and desires onto the other person,” he
mused. “You see what you want to see . ” When the romantic attachment
begins to wither, the partners take each other for granted, he con-
cluded, and when children arrive, passion turns into parenting. 14

While relieved that the tension finally broke, the separation
nonetheless left Hefner upset, uncertain, and unconfident. Close
friends were concerned. Dick and Anne Stewart described him as
unhappy and at loose ends. Mark Saginor put it more colorfully. “He
was squashed like a june bug. ... He couldn’t move. He was in the
bushes. He runs like a whipped puppy whenever she crooks a finger
or bats an eyelash.” Hefner admitted his heartache, telling an inter-
viewer, ‘We’ve all been there. We’ve all had our punches in the gut.”
Even years later, he declared, “She put me through Hell.” But he tried
to retain his characteristic optimism. Not long after the separation,
he characterized it as “more a new beginning than an ending” and
claimed — with some irony, since he had said the same thing when he
married Kimberly — that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote — “there
are no second acts in American lives” — needed revision. 15

But for a man whose self-image had always been wrapped up with
his attraction to women, advancing age posed a grave fear. As he pon-
dered the future, he was haunted by a comment from a close friend,
who had observed that as he got older, attractive young women had a
way of looking right through him. Hefner feared that he had become
similarly transparent. But the publisher quickly recovered his confi-
dence, and within a few weeks of the separation he was spotted at sev-
eral trendy Los Angeles clubs, dancing and nuzzling with a number
of beautiful young women. A short time later, he began dating several
Playmates — Carrie Stevens, Jamie Ferrell, and Jaime Bergman. “It’s
nice to discover that you’re still a babe magnet in your 70s and the
action has been incredible,” he wrote John Dante in May 1998. “It’s
a whole new world out there — and age isn’t even a consideration.” 16

Gradually, Playboy began to publicize its publisher’s regenerated
bachelorhood. A December 1998 article observed, “After a decade of
devoted family life, the legendary Mansion madness is back, replete
with Playmates prowling the grounds.” “The World of Playboy”

432

MR. PLAYBOY

returned with images of an exuberant Hefner in the company of
attractive, buxom young women. “Do these photos look like Hef is
suffering from separation anxiety? Since his marital status changed,
he has been stepping out again for retro Rat Pack nights of cocktails,
swing dancing, and healthy blondes,” said one caption. A Playboy
Christmas cartoon showed a smiling Hefner with his arm around
several unclad young beauties as a perplexed Santa Claus asked, “No,
seriously. What could you possibly want?” 17

A pharmaceutical advancement aided Hefners rebirth as a
party animal. In April 1998, on his seventy-second birthday, the
publisher was introduced to Viagra, and after celebrating in the
grotto Jacuzzi with four young women, he never looked back. “I’d
say that it is as close as anyone can imagine to the fountain of
youth,” he enthused. “It’s really a recreational drug that takes all
the uncertainty out of the moment. . . . There’s nothing physical
holding you back.” In his zeal, Hefner titled one of his scrapbook
volumes “Viva Viagra.” Over the next year, he also spruced up his
physical presence by having cosmetic neck surgery and by jetti-
soning the thick aviator glasses he had sported over much of the
previous decade. 18

Rejuvenated both emotionally and physically, Hefner embraced
his liberated life with gusto. Ry the late summer of 1998 he had en-
tered into a relationship with several young women who moved into
the mansion as his girlfriends. The “Rrande, Sandy, and Mandy”
period began as he dated aspiring actress Rrande Roderick, and
then met a pair of twins, Sandy and Mandy Rentley, at a club. When
the sisters disappeared that first evening, he hired a private inves-
tigator, who chased them down, one in Las Vegas and the other
near Chicago. A friend of the twins, Jessica Paisley, often joined
the group. For the next two years, Hefner club-hopped around
Los Angeles with his bevy of girlfriends, occasionally meeting close
friends such as Alison Reynolds and Joel Rerliner. 19

Hefner delighted in his new life as a man about town. He eagerly
soaked up the adulation of young men and women alike at trendy
nightclubs such as Rarfly, Garden of Eden, Snatch, Las Palmas, the
Opium Den, and Rliss. Journalists could be snide. “When Hef, a
living, breathing remnant of the Rat Pack era, walked into the club
there was a collective gasp,” wrote one. “The scene was pure Austin

BACK IN THE GAME

433

Powers — Hef was hermetically unsealed and absolutely swinging,
baby!” Hefner happily ignored the condescension. With his “Party
Posse” in tow, he cracked jokes about being a “babe magnet” and about
his girlfriends’ platinum locks: “Picasso had his blue period. Pm in
my blonde period.” When skeptics scoffed at his multiple girlfriends,
Hefner shrugged. “There’s a bonding here, a romantic connection in
which we do what we do together and have a wonderful time,” he
said. “It’s just not politically correct.” Surviving a marital crack-up to
reenter the social scene, he joyfully discovered “a whole new genera-
tion has grown up and was waiting for me to come out and play.” 20

Within a couple of years, the girlfriend scene at the mansion
shifted. In May 2000 Brande Roderick moved out to take a full-time
television role, and a short time later, Sandy Bentley became mired in
a sex-and-money scandal. Unbeknownst to Hefner, she was consort-
ing with Mark Yagalla, a young, unscrupulous hedge fund manager in
Las Vegas who showered her with over $6 million in gifts before an
FBI investigation led to his arrest for misappropriation of investors’
funds. When controversy erupted and Yagalla headed to jail, a disen-
chanted Hefner asked both Bentleys and Paisley to leave. 21

A new phase began when Tina Jordan hooked up with Hefner
in the late summer of 2000. A buxom blonde with a small daugh-
ter, she met the publisher at a mansion pool party and they hit it
off immediately. Soon she moved in and became the publisher’s pri-
mary girlfriend. A new constellation of girlfriends gathered around
her with the arrival of Buffy Tyler, Katie Lohmann, Tiffany Holliday,
Stephanie Heinrich, Cathi O’Malley, and several others. When Jordan
departed in 2002, Holly Madison, who had arrived the year before,
came to the fore as Hefner’s chief girlfriend. By 2003, yet another
platinum “Hef Troop” was in place that included Bridget Marquardt,
Zoe Gregory-Paul, Cristal Camden, Sheila Levell, Renee Sloan, and
Izabella Kasprzyk. As had been the case since the late 1990s, Hefner’s
female companions were given a yearly allowance for their appear-
ances in support of the publisher and Playboy, provided an expense
account for clothing, and given a curfew. 22

Hefner viewed this kaleidoscopic girlfriend scene as a restorative
replay of the 1970s. Delighted that young women still found him
attractive, he enjoyed their favors as a soothing balm after the pro-
tracted pain of his failed marriage. He saw no reason for commitment.

434

MR. PLAYBOY

This exciting, unorthodox new life was not only “fulfilling beyond
words,” as he put it later, but more genuine and authentic in terms
of his own nature. “In the 1990s, with the family, I was trying to live
the way I had been taught,” he explained. “The way I’m living now is
who I really am.” Hefner felt young again, and the physical benefits
were considerable. Fortified with Viagra, the septuagenarian pub-
lisher enjoyed regular sessions of group sex. “Hes a wonderful lover,
regardless of his age,” Madison told the press. “You don’t spend fifty
years being Mr. Playboy and not learn a few things.” 23

The rejuvenated social scene at the Playboy Mansion elicited much
commentary. The picture of seven platinum blondes in their twenties
being squired and serviced by a seventysomething Hefner aroused
divergent opinions, as did the rush of young celebrities to attend
Mr. Playboy’s celebrated parties. Some saw it as an embarrassing case
of postmodern irony. “He is Unfrozen Caveman Swinger, cryogeni-
cally preserved since the 70s,” wrote David Plotz in Slate. But many
found the publisher’s resurgent life to be fascinatingly retro cool.
“The Playboy bunny has been reenergized, and Hef’s house is hop-
ping again,” noted Harpers Bazaar in a special 1999 story. “Publicists
are dialing like crazy to get their clients into parties at the Playboy
Mansion, which is the hot list to be on once again.” Vanity Fair
awarded Hefner aplace in its “1999 Hall of Fame.” A two-page photo
by Annie Leibovitz showed Hefner and two girlfriends sprawled on
his oversized bed while two others stood behind embracing. He was
“presiding anew over the pagan splendors of his pleasure palace,” the
caption noted. 24

Hefner relished the attention. “It’s like discovering Elvis is alive
and well and living in your supermarket,” he joked. “There is a
younger generation that relates to me, to Playboy and the Mansion,
the swinging Sixties and Seventies. They are excited that they might
be able to revisit a time they missed.” People could think what they
wanted. Emerging from the ruins of his collapsed marriage with a
renewed commitment to the Playboy lifestyle, he was thrilled to pre-
side over a revitalized scene at the mansion. 25

The public regeneration that characterized Hefner’s personal life
after his marriage ended also marked his company and magazine.
Facing equally trying circumstances as they left the 1990s, they made
strides toward reviving the Playboy brand. In the new century, it
would appear more vibrant than it had in a quarter centuiy.

BACK IN THE GAME

435

In late 2003, Hefner and Playboy launched a lengthy celebration
of the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary. A voluminous “Collectors
Edition” issue appeared on the heels of a national advertising cam-
paign that touted it as “The Magazine That Changed America.”
On November 30, Hefner hosted a television special on the A&E
Network. Cohosted by Drew Carey and Jenny McCarthy, the show
took place at the mansion and featured comedy and musical acts to
entertain hundreds of guests. Film footage and images from Playboy’s
half century of history spiced this homage to Hefner, and Ray Bradbury
got off the line of the evening. Describing how the magazine’s nude
photos usually drew attention from its excellent array of articles, he
quipped that most people “couldn’t see the forest for the tease.” 26

The fiftieth anniversary celebration triggered an outpour-
ing of commentary on Hefner and Playboy s impact on American
life. Newspapers, magazines, television stations, and web journals
throughout the United States tried to make sense, often at some
length, of Mr. Playboy and his publication’s influence on modern val-
ues. Assessments differed widely. 27

Social conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and feminists
denounced the Playboy influence. The conservative pundit Cal
Thomas complained that Hefner’s magazine had helped shape “a cul-
ture without rules, without signposts, and without meaning,” while
Connie Schultz, a feminist columnist, mocked Playboy for idealizing
freakish females with “a waist the size of a bottle cap and breasts that
would keep them afloat in a tsunami.” Townhall.com, an influential
conservative Web site, blamed Hefner for a “demoralization of the
culture” that vulgarized male-female relationships and corroded “an
appreciation of intimacy through trust, the basis for every good rela-
tionship and every good marriage.” Christianity Today concluded that
Hefner had won a “hollow victory” by mainstreaming pornography.
Playboy’s warped view of women, relationships, and sex, it argued,
had created a moral “toxic dump” that would take many decades to
clean up. 28

But most critics offered a more respectful reading of the Playboy
legacy. Enthusiastically in some cases, grudgingly in others, most com-
mentators granted Hefner’s success in liberating America’s sexual val-
ues from outdated, stultifying moral restraints. “Playboy has arguably

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MR. PLAYBOY

become one of the half-dozen or so most influential magazines in
publishing history,” claimed the Los Angeles Times, while Newsday
described the magazine as “the unofficial publication of the sexual
revolution.” The Times Magazine in London placed it among a trio
of influences — along with the Pill and rock V roll — that most shaped
the changing sexual standards of postwar America. A long essay by
Richard Corliss in Time contended that Hefners magazine not only
initiated several generations of men into the mysteries of sex, but also
influenced the shape of American society. “That’s because Hefner had
more than a business model; he had a philosophy,” wrote Corliss. “He
may have been after something more enlightened than an empire.
A republic. Playboy’s Republic.” Even the conservative National
Review admitted that Playboy had advanced the cause of freedom.
“A society that allows Playboy is not a society that allows women to
be stoned to death for adultery,” argued Catherine Seipp. “Human
nature being what it is, we’re probably stuck with either burkas or
naked balloon breasts forever. I know which I prefer.” 29

Yet many observers agreed that Playboy’s contemporary impact
had declined. The sexual revolution had been won long ago and erotic
material was available everywhere. Noted one thoughtful critic of the
fiftieth anniversary, “Its impossible not to hear the baleful strumming
of nostalgia in the ceremonies. The Mansion may be swinging, but
it’s full of ghosts . . . there’s no question that its brightest glory days
are behind it.” Even Corliss, while fondly praising Playboy, admitted
that the long-running magazine had tended to “calcify.” After a half
century, Playboy had become an institution, with all the positive and
negative baggage that entailed. 30

While still stylish and intelligent, the magazine appeared predict-
able, almost staid, in the new century. With the end of Hefner’s mar-
riage, the 1990s new traditionalist orientation faded as it attempted
to recapture the spirit of an earlier age. The Playmate of the Month
remained, of course, as did the erotic pictorials on attractive actresses,
entertainers, and celebrities. The Playboy Interview, Playboy Forum,
and Playboy Advisor retained their traditional place in the format,
along with the charting of new movies, CDs, fashion trends, and lei-
sure fads. New monthly features — “Wired” and “Living Online” —
gave a nod to the Internet age. Overall, Playboy arrived every month
like a visit from an old friend — pleasant, agreeable, unsurprising. It
offered a well-written, visually pleasing melange of pieces on lifestyle,

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popular culture, and sex for middle-class, middle-aged men. The
good life had become the comfortable life.

But a cohort of brash new challengers had arisen to under-
cut Playboy’s appeal and audience. By the late 1990s, the so-called
“lad books” had burst onto the magazine scene with great fanfare.
Publications such as Maxim, FHM, and Stuff appealed to younger
male readers with an irreverent, ironic, intentionally unsophisticated
sensibility. Sporting a beer-and-babes attitude, they discussed “How to
Score at Funerals,” the finer points of chugging contests at parties, and
frat-boy enjoyment of life’s animal pleasures. They also featured erotic
pictorials of scantily clad young women, although actual nudity seldom
appeared. As one critic snorted, the lad books provided “short lessons
in ways to become even more shallow than you already are.” Despite
their crudities, these Generation X magazines grew increasingly popu-
lar with the coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four male readers. 31

Hefner felt the heat. Although sales still placed Playboy first
among mens magazines — its average sales of 3.2 million per issue
outdistanced the lad books by quite a bit — he grew increasingly con-
cerned that his aged publication had lost touch with youth values.
Supported by many staffers, he pondered an overhaul of the maga-
zine. “Quite frankly, what I’m looking for is contemporary version of
what Playboy meant in the 60s and 70s,” he noted. As this crisis
of confidence mounted, Arthur Kretchmer, the editorial director of
Playboy since the early 1970s, decided to retire. He also had grown
weary of trying to stay conversant with current trends, and sensed the
growing pressure for change. “At this point in my life, I don’t care
who Weezer is,” he confessed. “And that’s not fair to Weezer, that’s
not fair to Playboy magazine.” Choosing Kretchmer’s replacement
offered an opportunity to recharge the publication. 32

Hefner responded by stealing into the challenger’s encamp-
ment and carrying off a willing hostage. In September 2002, Hefner
approved the hiring of James Kaminsky, an editor at Maxim, as the
new editorial director of Playboy, and charged him with updating
the magazine. Hefner wanted a revived Playboy that would be more
lifestyle and less explicit sexuality: “A fresh eye. Better nonfiction.
More must-read pieces. More humor.” He coveted some of the lad
books’ irreverence without being “intentionally dumb.” For youthful
readers, Hefner hoped, Playboy would provide “the next step after
Maxim. It’s martinis instead of beer.” 33

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MR. PLAYBOY

Kaminsky promised to revise the magazine while respecting its
traditions. Playboy, he told the press, had first fired his imagination
for journalism as an adolescent and now he hoped to recapture its
greatness. “My goal is to take this great editorial package that has worked
for 50 years and move it forward for a new generation,” he noted.
Describing himself as a “change agent,” he explained that he wanted
to make Playboy relevant to “a 25-year-old guy who’s never seen this
magazine before and maybe picking it up for the first time.” Kaminsky
agreed that the ultimate goal was to capture lad-book readers when
they became a bit older, more sophisticated, and more serious. 34

Despite his endorsement of “an evolution, not a revolution,”
Kaminsky moved quickly — brutally, many insiders thought — to
change the magazine. He elbowed Kretchmer aside during the
transition period, and by mid-2003 his influence became evident.
Playboy began to feature shorter, snappier articles with more pho-
tographs, sidebars, boxes, and charts. A growing number of humor
pieces appeared, as did younger writers doing investigative pieces on
topics such as the murder of rap star Jam Master Jay, the SARS virus,
and Wal-Mart’s labor practices. New sections on video games and
electronics appeared, along with hipper male fashion spreads with
skateboarders and surfers as models.

The results were greeted skeptically. A humor magazine satirized
Playboy’s overhaul: (1) “Scaling back from boobies, boobies, boobies,
to just boobies, boobies”; (2) “Aggressively referring to men as ‘guys’”;
(3) “Stealing New Yorker staff writer Seymour Hersh, having him write
comprehensive piece on history of the thong”; (4) “Finding out what’s
in FHM, doing that.” The twenty-five-year-old art director at the
Chicago Tribune — one of Kaminsky’s targeted readers — examined
the reworked Playboy and scoffed that its much-publicized changes
amounted to “nothing more than a fresh coat of paint” covering “a
schizophrenic desire to appeal to multiple generations.” The result-
ing hodgepodge reeked of “Old Man Poser. . . . Playboy’s half stuck
in the last century, while trying to get some footing in this one.” 35

The Kaminsky experiment soon collapsed. While his moves had
freshened the Playboy appeal, his heavy-handed managerial style
alienated almost everyone working at the magazine. There had been
signs of trouble from the beginning. The day before Kaminsky started,
according to Hefner, a dismayed Kretchmer, who had been meeting
with the new director, called to say, “We have made a terrible mistake.
This guy is a nut case.” Indeed, Kaminsky’s bulldozer-style maneuvers

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produced numerous personality clashes that left him widely loathed.
“He couldn’t get along with anybody,” Hefner concluded. Low morale
turned to outright rebellion as the new editor disparaged longtime
staffers as out of touch or incompetent, and fired many of them.
Those who remained saw his “Maximizing” of Playboy as taking it
downmarket, and Hefner grew concerned that Playboy “was losing
its soul.” Finally, the publisher dismissed Kaminsky in April 2004
and replaced him with a trio of young in-house editors: Christopher
Napolitano as the editorial director, with Lee Froehlich and Steve
Randall as associate editors. With Hefners backing, they continued
the project of updating the venerable publication, but proceeded in a
slower, more subtle fashion and sought to retain elements of Playboy’s
traditional sophistication. 36

Thus Playboy struggled to define itself in the new century. No lon-
ger a trendsetter in shaping American values, it faced the problem of
how to attract younger readers while retaining the loyalty of longtime
ones. This proved a daunting task in an age when print readership
was dropping, the Internet was expanding explosively, and adver-
tisers were drawn to the new technology. Moreover, the magazine’s
message of pleasurable living and personal liberation no longer
quickened the pulse, having become part of the common wisdom
in modern America. Despite Hefner’s hopes, the magazine would
never again be the force it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. As even
he admitted, it was fated to be a “loss leader” for PEI, a symbol of
the Playboy lifestyle for the entertainment and licensing endeavors
of the company. 37

Playboy Enterprises, Inc., also faced fresh challenges in the new
century. After enjoying steady, moderate profits throughout the
1990s, it encountered difficulties by decade’s end. A December 2000
analysis in Business Week pointed to several problems: unprofitable
forays into the Internet and television, declining stock prices, a per-
ception among investors that Playboy had lost touch with younger
consumers. An angry Christie Hefner retorted that the company’s
long-term, costly investments in online business and cable television
would bear fruit shortly. Both disputants were partly right: while the
company was losing money as the 2000s began, its strategy held out
the possibility of recovery and future prosperity. 38

Under the younger Hefner’s leadership, PEI built its future on a
two-part foundation: multimedia entertainment, and the strong licens-
ing potential of the Playboy brand. The company had discovered the

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MR. PLAYBOY

potential of the Internet early, launching Playboy.com as a platform
for erotic material and e-commerce. Web sales of Playboy merchan-
dise grew slowly and steadily, but the Internet audience for its mild
entertainment fare remained small. PEIs forays into cable televi-
sion were more profitable. From 1999 to 2001, it purchased several
pay-TV channels of the Spice Network, which offered explicit sexual
films. These deals undercut Playboys long-standing reputation for
fresh-scrubbed, innocent sexuality, but Hugh and Christie Hefner
justified the purchase as a diversification of the company, much like
Disney’s creation of Touchstone Pictures to distribute its R-rated
movies. Wall Street applauded the move as PEI began making money
from the new acquisitions. 39

By 2004, PEI was showing a profit. Hopes for the future rested with
several new ventures: gaming, as in the recently opened Playboy Club
complex in Las Vegas in partnership with the Palms, and in a casino proj-
ect in Macau, recently described as “the vortex of Asia’s resurgent gam-
ing craze;” and Playboy U, a MySpace-type Internet social network. As
technology and global markets lead PEI into the future, according to a
recent assessment, the company’s three divisions have clear goals: televi-
sion and Internet projects aimed at a younger audience, Playboy target-
ing yuppie males, and licensed products projected toward women. PEI
management remains optimistic that digital technology, global markets,
licensing opportunities, and location-based entertainment hold the key
to future growth and profit. Only time will tell. 40

Midway through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the
Playboy brand is hotter than it has been in years. At the same time,
PEI remains a midsize communications and entertainment company
with a trajectory of modest growth, while the value of its stock has
remained fairly low and the rabbit’s appeal seems mostly “retro cool”
rather than genuinely vibrant in terms of contemporary influence.
But whatever the future may hold, Hefner’s position is secure. He
has become a legend. 41

Ill

On a typical Friday evening in March 2005, Hugh Hefner perched on
a leather sofa at the front of his living room movie theater and faced a
crowd of about one hundred friends who were settling back in chairs

BACK IN THE GAME

441

after an elegant buffet dinner. He began to read from carefully
prepared, handwritten notes on the evenings film from the early
1930s. Engrossed in the lore of old movies, one of his great pas-
sions, Hefner related details about the making of the film, its star,
Barbara Stanwyck, its producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, and its reception
by the public and the critics. An uncut version of the movie had
recently been discovered at the Library of Congress, he reported, and
was being shown by special arrangement. As Hefner concluded his
talk — “And now, from 1933, Baby Face ” — and waved his hand for the
projectionist to roll the film, the appreciative audience clapped. 42

The Friday evening classic film has anchored the schedule of life
at the Playboy Mansion since the early 1990s. On Saturday evenings,
Hefner shows movies of 1930s-1950s vintage, while Sundays see
screenings of just-released films, both attended by dozens of regular
guests. The publisher plays gin rummy with a small group of old
Chicago buddies on Wednesday evenings, and then goes out with
his girlfriends to a restaurant and a club on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Perhaps Hefners favorite evening comes on Mondays “Manly
Night,” when about a dozen male friends convene for dinner and
an old movie. The group includes Keith Hefner, jazz trumpeter Ray
Anthony, comedian Chuck McCann, actors Robert Culp and Johnny
Crawford, producer Bill Shepard, documentary filmmaker Kevin
Burns, producer-director Peter Vieira, entertainer Dick Stewart, and
film historians Richard Bann, Ron Borst, and Mark Cantor (until
their deaths a few years ago, singer Mel Torme and actor-comedian
Bob Ridgely also were members of the group). Male camaraderie
rules the day as the old friends banter, argue about movies and music,
and exchange good-natured insults. Even the big, glitzy mansion
parties occur on a clockwork schedule: New Years Eve, Casablanca
Night/Hefner’s birthday in April, Midsummer Night’s Dream in early
August, and Halloween in late October. Hefner’s life unfolds accord-
ing to a carefully regulated routine, where several dozen friends in
regular attendance create a pseudo-family atmosphere.

But this image of domestic contentment muffles the fact that
Hefner has reemerged as a bigger public figure than at any time since
his heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. When he ventured out to trendy
Los Angeles clubs with a bevy of female companions after his separa-
tion, Generation Xers flocked to his table chanting, “You’re the man!
You’re the god! You rule!” “He is the most famous man, with the most

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MR. PLAYBOY

famous house, in the most famous neighborhood in the world. He has
the most famous parties, with the most famous guests, and their fame
is the source of his own,” wrote Rolling Stone in 2000. “Famous for
being famous among the famous.” 43

Confirmation of Hefner s legendary status has rolled in from every
direction. He was inducted into the Magazine Hall of Fame on April 28,
1998, along with, ironically, Gloria Steinem. The following year brought
a roast at the Friars Club in New York City and the year after that a
special fete by the Harvard Lampoon, which dubbed him “Lampoons
Greatest Life Force in the History of the Universe.” In the summer
of 2005 the Discovery Channel chose Hefner as one of the “Hundred
Greatest Americans.” Public honors also came to the publisher in this
period for his contribution of almost $1 million to the UCLA Archives
and for an even larger gift to the US C School of Cinema for the preser-
vation and restoration of old Hollywood films. 44

Hefners renewed cachet also inspired a spate of appearances in adver-
tising campaigns. He was featured in a television ad for Motorola in 2000,
and a magazine ad for Tanqueray gin the following year, in which two
Playmates stared lustfully at a gin bottle (“Distinctive Since 1830”) while
Hefner, in his trademark smoking jacket (“Distinctive Since 1953”), gave
them a look of mock admonishment. In 2003, he posed with blond trip-
lets in a print ad for Ecko clothing, and then created a minor controversy
in a television campaign for Carls Jr. Preparing to take a bite out of a
burger, he said, “People always ask me, hey Hef, do you have favorites?
I tell them no, it’s not like that ... I love them all. It just depends on what
I’m in the mood for.” Then a voice-over completed the double entendre:
“One of six five-dollar burgers at Carls Jr. Because some guys don’t like
the same thing, night after night.” Conservatives were outraged. 45

Hefner became a sought-after figure for appearances in television
series. From 2001 to 2005 he had cameo roles in the comedies Just
Shoot Me, The Bemie Mac Show, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, as well
as the dramas Las Vegas, with old friend James Caan, and Entourage.
Popular musical artists also sought out the Playboy Mansion, making
it a site for videos starring Justin Timberlake, Nelly, and Weezer. 46

Hefner even raised some political hackles. At the 2000
Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, “Bunnygate” erupted when
U.S. Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez scheduled a fund-raising event at
the Playboy Mansion. The campaign of nominee Al Gore, keen to dis-
tance itself from Playboy, tried to force a change of venue. When Sanchez

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refused to alter the event, Gore managers took away her speaking spot
at the upcoming convention. She finally relented and relocated the
fund-raiser to Universal Studios, while Hefner berated the Democrats
for “acting like a bunch of right-wing Republicans.” 47

The biggest sign of Hefners resurgence, however, came with a hit
television series. The Girls Next Door debuted in the fall of 2005 on
the E! channel as a “reality show” depicting daily life at the Playboy
Mansion through the eyes of the publishers youthful girlfriends.
After several of Hefner’s blonde companions departed during an
acrimonious split the previous year, he had settled into a relationship
with three young women. With the show, they quickly emerged as
television celebrities in their own right. 48

Holly Madison had come to the mansion in 2001. After stints at
college in Portland and Los Angeles, where she studied psychology
and theater, she dropped out of school to gauge other opportuni-
ties. A Hefner friend saw her in a bikini contest — she was working
for Hawaiian Tropic and at Hooters — and invited her to a mansion
party where she met Hefner. At his bequest, she joined his group of
girlfriends, and when Tina Jordan decided to leave in 2002, Madison
became the publisher’s “head girlfriend.” They became devoted to
one another, and by 2005 she was talking publicly about wanting mar-
riage and children. More recently she has become an assistant photo
editor for Playboy helping with Playmate shoots. 49

Bridget Marquardt entered Hefner’s orbit after earning a bache-
lor’s degree in communications and public relations from Sacramento
State, followed by a master’s degree from the University of the Pacific.
She had dreamed of being a Playmate, and first came to the mansion
while doing a photo shoot for the millennial Playmate search in 1998,
where she met Hefner and attended several parties. Following a
brief marriage that ended in a friendly separation, she moved to Los
Angeles in 2002 to pursue her Playboy dreams. Hefner asked her
to go out with him and his female companions, and she moved into
the mansion as a girlfriend. She became close friends with Madison
and deferred to her housemate’s romantic involvement with Hefner.
Delighted at being part of the mansion’s social whirl, she has pursued
a career in broadcast journalism at UCLA and now hosts her own
radio show. 50

Kendra Wilkinson, the youngest of the trio, became one of Hefner’s
girlfriends in 2004 at age eighteen following a serendipitous chain

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MR. PLAYBOY

of events. He was struck by her photograph as one of the “body-
painted” girls for a mansion party, and made a point of meeting her
at the festivities. The following week, he invited her to move into the
mansion. Bom and raised in San Diego, Wilkinson had been trau-
matized as a child when her father walked out on the family. She had
ran away as an adolescent, dropping out of school, abandoning her
athletic talent in soccer and softball, and spiraling downward into
street-kid destitution, suicidal gestures, and drug dependency. After
hitting rock bottom at age seventeen, she dropped the drug habit,
returned home, and went back to school to earn her high school
degree. She was working as a dental assistant when the Playboy
opportunity appeared unexpectedly, and she came to the mansion as
a dyed-in-the-wool sports fan with a strong attraction to the hip-hop
culture. “Hef saved me,” Wilkinson claims of this transformation in
her life. 51

The Girls Next Door, produced and directed by Kevin Burns, who
had done a documentary film on Hefner in the 1990s, focuses on
this trio of young women and their daily experiences at the Playboy
Mansion. Hefner remains at the margins, making intermittent
appearances as a fatherly (or grandfatherly) figure dispensing advice
and support to his platinum trio. The show emphasizes two themes.
First, it presents the activities of Holly, Bridget, and Kendra as a
fantasy where the girls enjoy a pampered regimen of fun: planning
a mystery-themed birthday party at the mansion, preparing elaborate
costumes for the Midsummer Night’s Dream Party, flying off to Las
Vegas to help a friend celebrate her Playmate of the Year selection,
enduring a grueling shoot for their first-ever Playboy pictorial, enjoy-
ing a ski trip on the slopes of Colorado, taking in the sights of Chicago
and New York City on promotional trips. Second, it consistently plays
the girlfriends’ contrasting personalities against one another. Madison
moves through the show as a grounded, cool, and calculating pres-
ence who is protective of Hefner and zealous in securing her position
as mistress of the mansion. Marquardt, with her pink confection,
bedroom and bubbly fascination with mysteries and the occult, offers
an emotional, vulnerable disposition that alternates between bouts
of girlish delight and tearful disappointment. Breezing through the
various segments with a tomboy athleticism and brash, in-your-face
sensibility, Wilkinson displays an instinctive comic touch that cre-
ates amusement from upending social convention Lucille Ball style.

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445

By turns sexy and outlandish, human and slightly surreal, funny and
sweet, the show presents a curiously compelling inside look at the
world of the rich and famous. As ads for the show proclaim, “We call
it a fantasy. They call it home.” 52

Equally striking, however, is the audience for The Girls Next Door.
Network executives expected it to be predominantly male, so early
promotional efforts focused on sex appeal: “Were about to take you
into the lives and the bedrooms of three women who all call magazine
mogul Hugh Hefner their boyfriend. . . . From the slumber parties
upstairs to the washing of dirty laundry downstairs . . . we’re about
to get intimate.” But surveys indicated that the audience was 70 per-
cent female, and overwhelmingly in the fifteen-to-forty age range.
Even more surprisingly, the show has garnered a positive response
from many liberated women. Daphne Merkin, a prominent feminist
critic, publicly confessed her “secret and somewhat worrying fascina-
tion with a retrograde show about the mindless adventures of three
Barbies . . . [who are] positively antediluvian in their embrace of
unliberated femininity” and “the ancient Sugar Daddy who funds
their fun.” Much comment and reaction suggests the show’s twofold
attraction for females. 53

On the one hand, The Girls Next Door presents a retro appeal
typical of the larger Playboy revival in the early 2000s. It offers a pre-
feminist fantasy of women being provided for, loved, and showcased
by an elderly, wealthy gentleman. As Merkin has put it, the show
updates the old “mutually accommodating (or mutually exploitive)
fantasies of what men and women can expect from each other circa
an idealized ’50s prototype ... a version of sexism that is benevolent
rather than hostile.” Women are idealized and protected, adored and
sustained in return for being loyal, good-looking, and noncompeti-
tive. This “Cinderella fantasy,” Merkin suggests, has a secret, momen-
tary appeal to even the most hardened feminist advocates of gender
equality. “It’s good fun,” she notes, and “we all need time off from
Hillary Clinton models of femaleness.” Marquardt’s fan mail seems
to confirm this as correspondents identify with “normal girls leading
a fantasy lifestyle.” Young females (or some part of them) are enticed
by the parties, the clothes, the manicures, the shopping, the mansion,
the butlers, and the traveling. “Hef s life has always been a fantasy
for men; this is the first time it’s become a fantasy for women,” says
Marquardt. 54

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MR. PLAYBOY

On the other hand, The Girls Next Door , in its own unorthodox
fashion, makes a statement of female empowerment. These three
young women make decisions and struggle to shape their own lives.
“I think that they’re strong women . . . making choices and taking
advantage of the opportunities that come their way,” says one female
lawyer of the show’s stars. From Holly’s determined effort to claim
her place as Hefner’s mate and work for the magazine, to Bridget’s
quest for a Playmate pictorial and a future in the communications
field, to Kendra’s demonstrations of athletic prowess and prudent
purchase of her own condominium, the trio pursue their own dreams
as Hefner stands in the wings, affectionately providing encourage-
ment and funds but never issuing directives. Merkin finds intriguing
the notion that the show is “strangely empowering in that it’s the
women who are in charge.” Again, Marquardt’s fan letters support
this point. Women tell her that the show has inspired them to work
out, go to college, follow their dreams, and pursue their own versions
of happiness. 55

The female fascination with the show confirms just how much
Hefner and the Playboy ethos have entered the mainstream after a
half century of endeavor. It suggests that the publisher, as his long
and controversial career enters its final stage, has emerged victorious
in a decades-long cultural war. As George Will, the respected con-
servative columnist, told Hefner when he arrived at the mansion for
an interview in 2003, “Congratulations. You won.” But the statement
encloses larger questions. What exactly has Hefner won and what is
the nature of his triumph? 56

EPILOGUE

Playboy Nation

T he black, leather-bound volumes sit silently in specially
constructed oak bookcases that line the rooms and hallways of
the Playboy Mansions third floor. Numbering over eighteen
hundred, and still growing, these “scrapbooks” memorialize Hugh
Hefners life. Begun when he was a teenager in Chicago, they detail
nearly everything that has happened to, and been said about, the
Playboy publisher over the last seven decades. Kevin Burns, a close
friend, once quipped that the publisher “documents his life more than
the Library of Congress,” while an associate joked, “Hef is living his
life posthumously.”

But the very existence of this huge archive reveals something
essential about its subject. Hefner, clearly, has been preoccupied with
his own life since adolescence. He views it, along with Playboy , as his
greatest creation. In fact, however, the two cannot be separated. “The
magazine has always been an extension of my own dreams and fan-
tasies,” Hefner admits. Like intertwined strands of cultural DNA,
both Playboy and the life of its creator embody some of the deepest
desires, values, and impulses at work in modern America over the
last half century . 1

447

448

MR. PLAYBOY

From the beginning, Hefners personal experiences provided the
stuff of his public career. The private man relentlessly pursued his
dream of “personal, political, and economic freedom” and viewed
his pursuit of fun not as immature, something critics often charged,
but as a happy embodiment of childhood optimism in a cynical
world. He challenged traditional institutions such as marriage, the
family, and religion because he had experienced them as impedi-
ments, not aids, to individual happiness. In Hefner’s calculus, the cru-
cial component was individual desire, not social expectation. He saw
his own life as demonstrating that “you don’t have to live by somebody
else s rules.” 2

This ethic of self-fulfillment came from deep roots in the publisher’s
complex personality. Hefner has exercised a compulsive control over
every aspect of his existence since gaining a measure of indepen-
dence when Playboy began to flourish. From diet to dress to hobbies
to social schedules, the Hefner way became one of orderly, unchang-
ing habits. Creating and superintending his living environment down
to the tiniest detail, he ignored usual conventions of night and day,
work and play, custom and convention when they conflicted with his
wishes. He became an efficiency expert focused on his own desire.

But alongside the obsessive controller stood the romantic.
Optimistic about human nature and deeply sentimental about
human relations, Hefner often quoted the playwright Dennis Potter
to describe his approach to the world: “I want to find a place where
the words to the songs are true.” This romanticism inspired a serial
wooing of young women — it was always about emotional connection
as much as sex — because the relationships allowed him to experi-
ence over and over the ecstasy of youthful romance. This romanti-
cism flowered with equal lushness in his lifelong love affair with the
movies. The glamour, adventure, and drama of those larger-than-
life images on the silver screen captured his imagination as a boy
and never relinquished their hold. Hefners favorite films provide
glimpses into his private world. He sees himself as Jimmy Stewart in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the lonely, noble hero taking
on the system in the interests of justice and liberty. He identifies with
Henry Fonda in The Male Animal (1942), the slightly nerdy pro-
tagonist who wins the girl from a popular athlete, takes on the estab-
lishment, and triumphs over the forces of censorship. He idolizes
Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942), the proprietor of a famous

PLAYBOY NATION

449

establishment where “everybody comes to Ricks place” yet he never
sits down with the customers, an apparent cynic who finally appears
as a sentimental idealist who gives up everything for the woman he
loves. For Hefner, film is a romantic metaphor for life as he would
like it to be. 3

Thus the Playboy publisher, much like Jay Gatsby, F. Scott
Fitzgeralds memorable character, is a man of internal ambiguities: a
controlling figure who yearns for romance and connection, an orga-
nizer of revelry who remains a step outside the ongoing party, a sweet-
natured and generous man who is nonetheless determined to pursue
his own gratification. Never a devil-may-care hedonist, Hefner has
sought his pleasure systematically, doggedly, even frantically in cer-
tain periods. This compulsion to have fun, in many ways, represents
a modern inversion of the old Protestant ethic with its compulsion
to work. Mr. Playboy is a serious sybarite, a sentimental seducer, a
disciplined devotee of desire.

But what makes Hefner significant, not just interesting, is that his
personal dreams and desires have resonated so broadly. For over fifty
years, he has touched something basic in the modern psyche while
coming to represent the quintessential American individual. The
Hefnerian creed of personal liberation, sexual freedom, and material
abundance, articulated in the pages of Playboy and promoted in
his highly publicized lifestyle, has played a leading role in reshap-
ing modern social values. But only sporadically has Hefners victory
been a case of rousing triumph and acclaim. While periodically enjoy-
ing a popular cachet, particularly from the late 1950s through the
mid-1970s, Hefner also suffered a repeated battering from many
traditionalists and certain feminists over the decades. Yet his resil-
iency and passionate, indefatigable advocacy kept him afloat. Hefner
and his Playboy worldview stood on the forward edge of history and
persevered as the American mainstream gradually, often unwittingly,
digested and assimilated its key tenets. As a commentary recently
conceded, “After 50 years of Playboy , we all live in Hef s world.” 4

Mr. Playboy has prevailed because of victories — usually slow-
gathering in pace and complex in nature — in four key campaigns.
First, and most obviously, Hefner survives as the most enduring
symbol of the sexual revolution and deserves considerable credit for
the sexual openness that has become so characteristic of modern
America. It is hard to remember that even in the 1960s married

450

MR. PLAYBOY

characters in television sitcoms slept in twin beds and were forced
to keep one foot on the floor at all times while kissing or embrac-
ing. Now premarital sex appears as the norm, sexual advice books
sit on the best-seller list, most repressive statutes forbidding sexual
activity have been repealed, and sexual frankness in entertainment
has become ubiquitous. An American presidents misadventures
with oral sex inspire graphic newspaper headlines and unembar-
rassed anatomical disquisitions. Wal-Mart sells The Girls Next Door
DVDs and Hooters offers a children’s menu. In a popular newspaper
cartoon, two teenage boys peruse a Playboy as one of them whispers,
“Pssst, the new ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’ Catalog’s hidden inside.’”
Clearly, the forces of sexual restraint have been pushed into enclaves
of dissent. Probably more than any other individual, Hefner has been
responsible for making relaxed, candid attitudes about sexuality stan-
dard fare in modern America. 5

Playboy offered a stylish model for the modem male in this new
world of sexual openness. Under Hefner’s leadership, the magazine
promoted a sophisticated approach for postwar men that occasionally
veered into crassness, but more often urged a standard of urbane,
gentlemanly behavior. It is easy, of course, to make fun of the Playboy
sensibility as a shallow sexual ploy, as in this imagined 1950s conver-
sation: “Female Acquaintance, lowering the volume on Miles Davis’
‘Kind of Blue’: ‘So are you personally persuaded by the critique of
Christian ethics that Nietzsche posits in The Genealogy of Morals?
And by the way, isn’t that a lithograph of ‘Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon’
next to your hi-fi?’ Swinging Playboy Bachelor: ‘Um, can you take off
your bra now?”’ But Hefner broke the mold by abandoning the old
rough-and-ready, outdoorsman ideal for, in Camille Paglia’s words,
“a new kind of man, a European-style man interested in fine ste-
reo equipment, good wine, sophisticated conversation, and progres-
sive ideas.” The Playboy style, almost always, urged men to treat
the women in their lives sensitively and not shabbily. As the Atlantic
observed, while men’s magazines such as Maxim and FHM encourage
“a lot of boyish grab-assing,” Hefner and Playboy always presented a
more mature, cosmopolitan vision: “finding a nifty chick and sharing
the good life with her.” 6

Second, Hefner has been a crucial influence on the ascendancy
of consumer culture over the last half of the twentieth century. After
a period of pent-up demand during the Great Depression and World

PLAYBOY NATION

451

War II, which had slowed the surge of consumer capitalism begun in
the early 1900s, Americans stood poised to resume their love affair
with material affluence. Hefner captured this yearning. From the
outset, he portrayed abundance, as well as relaxed sexual standards,
as keys to the good life idealized in his magazine. Readers concurred,
and so did the broader society. Enjoyment of a cornucopia of com-
modities became synonymous with the American Way of Life, and
Playboy provided monthly guidance on stylish consumption. Readers
“enjoyed imagining themselves as the Hefner male: the man who
wanted fine wines, chic cars, and smart clothes to go with his beauti-
ful women,” noted Time magazine. “Playboy was the ultimate con-
sumer magazine: the editorial and the advertising were one.” 7

Third, and most controversially, Hefner and his magazine have
played a vital, if complicated, role in the feminist revolution that has
transformed modern gender relations. On one hand, Playboy over-
turned traditional standards by promoting womens freedom to enjoy
sex and advocating economic opportunity, social equality, and abortion
rights for them. Hefners dream of “personal, political, and economic
freedom” became part and parcel of the great crusade for womens
rights that marched on to legal, social, and cultural triumph. On the
other hand, radical gender feminists attacked Playboy for degrading
women as sexual objects, portraying it as a bastion of male patriarchy
and oppression. They branded Hefner as the enemy.

From this tangle of competing claims, the publisher and his maga-
zine emerged as neither heroes nor goats. Instead, they served as
a catalyst for the feminist revolution, raising hackles even as they
reflected the evolution of mainstream attitudes. Like most Americans,
men as well as women, Hefner and Playboy came to support the
equity feminist movement for equal rights and opportunities while
retaining traditional notions of differences between the sexes and
rejecting gender warfare. In this dominant consensus by the end of
the twentieth century, Hefner, ironically, became a symbol of womens
freedom to make choices, whether that meant pursuing a business
career or displaying their bodily charms, or both. Standing amid the
maelstrom of debate over feminism for much of his career, he proved
to be a pivotal figure in the mainstream movement’s triumph.

Hefner s important contributions to sexual liberation, consumerism,
and womens rights ultimately created his fourth, and largest, role of
all. From a long-term historical perspective, he stands as a major

452

MR. PLAYBOY

architect of America s dominant culture of self-fulfillment during the
twentieth century, a value system that replaced the Victorian code
of self-control from an earlier age. His significance stands on par
with such major figures as Henry Ford and Walt Disney. The popu-
lar automobile maker, of course, pioneered a compelling ideology of
consumer values, abundance, and self-fulfillment in the early 1900s
and transported it into mainstream culture in his legendary Model T.
In the middle decades of the century, the beloved Hollywood film-
maker, television pioneer, and theme park creator built upon this
foundation by utilizing elements of magic, sentiment, leisure, and
consumer marketing to help forge the American Way of Life. Over
the last few decades of the twentieth century, Hefner brought the
trend to a culmination. More than any other single figure in this latter
era, he has symbolized the combination of sexual liberation, material
affluence, and personal self-fulfillment that characterizes the modern
American dream. 8

But utopias, of course, do not exist in real life. Thus Hefners
legacy — the modern America he did so much to shape — has created
perils as well as promises. The sexual revolution, for instance, has
relieved individuals from the burden of excessive repression and
ventilated the stifling atmosphere of guilt and shame that long sur-
rounded this powerful human urge. But it also has opened the flood-
gates, in ways that the Playboy publisher never intended, for a great
wave of crude sexual imagery and moneymaking exploitation that too
often cheapened what it meant to honor. Moreover, sexual freedom
fighters such as Hefner tend to see only the beautiful, creative, civi-
lizing capacities of Eros. In trying to chain this animal impulse with
reason, they overlook its dark capacities for inciting jealousy and lust,
rage and rejection, power and possession. Ironically, as Henry Louis
Gates Jr. has observed, sexual liberationists often appear as innocents
who advance “the truly bizarre notion that sex could ever be ren-
dered safe, anodyne, biodegradable, predictable, guilt-free, domes-
ticated, wholesome.” Thus the sexual revolution, like any successful
insurrection, has opened new possibilities for destruction as well as
liberation. 9

Similarly, the triumph of modem consumer culture has created
mixed blessings. Realizing what Franklin Roosevelt famously termed
“freedom from want,” the great mass of Americans since the 1950s
have come to enjoy a standard of living that is the envy of the world.

PLAYBOY NATION

453

But this mantle of materialism has been suffocating as well as
sustaining. Ranging from the environmental left to the religious
right, with many variants in between, critics have pointed out that the
worship of economic abundance has encouraged a shallow material-
ism that tends to measure everything — personal happiness, political
achievement, social relations, educational goals, religious or philo-
sophical standards — according to a yardstick of unfettered consump-
tion. Not only has this encouraged a worldview too often marked by
spiritual sterility and social greed, but it has undermined the work
ethic and made the notion of meaningful, creative, productive labor
nearly obsolete. Modem consumer culture confirms that in human
affairs, new forms of liberation almost always create new forms of
imprisonment.

Troubling issues also persist with regard to womens rights. Equity
feminism represents the best in the American dream and Hefner and
Playboy deserve applause for helping to liberate females for sexual
pleasure, advocating their full legal and political rights, and staunchly
insisting that gender equality must not erase gender differences. At
the same time, and primarily due to the torrent of sexual images that
inundate modern life, both Hefner and modern America have walked
a precarious line regarding humane, democratic principles. Men see-
ing women (and vice versa) as sex objects is perfectly natural and in
accordance with the biological imperatives of the species. But seeing
women only as sexual creatures diminishes them and threatens to
undermine a larger creed of human equality. With its unwavering
emphasis on female nudity and sexual appeal, Playboy tends to slight
other valuable dimensions of female life and experience in favor of
the erotic. Hefner and the American mainstream, while reasonably
rejecting overheated claims of male sexual tyranny and gender war-
fare, must be careful to recognize the full humanity of women.

Most broadly, Americas modern culture of self-fulfillment has
delivered mixed blessings. Unquestionably, the crusade to satisfy
emotional and physical desires has brought enrichment and joy to
individual lives previously restrained in the iron cage of self-denial.
Yet it also has created new difficulties. In a society of playboys and
playgirls, for instance, family attachment, the basis of any society,
has grown more difficult as gratification-seeking individuals find the
sacrifices of marriage and childrearing increasingly hard to justify.
Even more importantly, the culture of self-fulfillment molded by

454

MR. PLAYBOY

Playboy and others has made it difficult to conceive of the public
good. Maintaining commitments beyond the self, for many modem
citizens, has become an alien, if not incomprehensible, notion.

Ultimately, however, the allure of fantasy has bound Hefner and
the Playboy nation to the possibilities, rather than the problems, of
modern self-fulfillment. The publishers dreams of intense romantic
love, material abundance, a perfectly ordered life, and complete
sexual and emotional gratification have defined the pursuit of happi-
ness in modern America. “The fantasy in Playboy became a reality for
society,” Hefner has observed. Indeed, since World War II citizens of
the world s most abundant nation increasingly envisioned their society
as one of endless possibilities. The Playboy ethos has become main-
stream, with its powerful current pulling along many, perhaps most,
modern Americans toward a common destination: self-fulfillment in
every way imaginable in a world with few restraints. This has become
the essence of the modern American dream “where the dark fields
of the republic rolled on under the night,” in Fitzgeralds phrase. For
good or ill — and the publisher would be the first to agree that each
individual must be free to judge — we do live in a Playboy world in
modern America. And what we think of Hugh Hefner is what we
think of us . 10

NOTES

Several matters in the notes require brief explanation. HH stands for Hugh Hefner. HP
refers to the Hefner Papers, a very large collection of documents, interview transcripts,
company memos, and various historical papers housed at the Playboy Mansion in
Los Angeles. HS, followed by a volume number, indicates the Hefner Scrapbooks, some
eighteen hundred bound, numbered volumes that Hefner has been accumulating since
his adolescence, also housed in the Playboy Mansion. HHIA indicates Hugh Hefner
interview with the author, a battery of nearly forty hours of interviews that I conducted
with Mr. Hefner from 2003 to 2007. PP stands for Playboy Papers, a collection of the
company’s historical records and documents on file at the headquarters of Playboy
Enterprises, Inc., in Chicago. Unless otherwise indicated, the numerous interviews
with friends, family, and associates of Hefner refer to tapes or transcripts that are part
of the HP holdings.

My analysis of Hugh Hefner, Playboy , and their impact on modem American values
has relied upon a very large body of scholarly literature on topics such as consumerism,
the sexual revolution, postwar American culture, the 1960s, the age of Reagan, and so
on. Because of space limitations, the notes indicate only the most salient secondary
sources that have been consulted.

INTRODUCTION. THE BOY NEXT DOOR

1. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

2. The Pursuit of Pleasure, NBC, May 8, 1967, videotape, HP.

3. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York,
1973 [1961]), 37, 240.

CHAPTER 1 . A BOY AT PLAY

1. HH, quoted in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans (New York, 1970), 38; Glenn
Hefner file, HH Memo titled “Dad Dies,” August 3, 1992, 6; and HHIA, November
6, 2003.

2. Grace C. Hefner, Remembering: A Collection of Memories (privately printed, 1994),
37-38, 10-11, 28-29, 13, 33.

3. Ibid., 18, 31-32, 37-38.

4. Ibid., 35-39, 45^6, 52, 54-56, and HS, Vol. 25.

455

456

NOTES TO PAGES 14-22

5. Grace Hefner, Remembering, 59-62.

6. Ibid., 62, 65-67, and HS, Vol. 25.

7. HS, Vol. 25; Keith Hefner interview with Lynch/Frost Productions, April 19, 1991, 3;
and HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

8. Keith Hefner interview with Hal Higdon, 1967; HS, Vol. 25; HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

9. Grace, quoted in Boyd, My FeUow Americans, 39, and Jim Brophy, “Other Voices,”
March 18, 1986, 1.

10. HS, Vols. 25 and 26, and Jim Brophy, “Other Voices,” March 18, 1986, 1.

11. HS, Vols. 25 and 26.

12. Ibid.

13. HS,Vol. 26.

14. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

15. Ibid.; Keith Hefner interview with Hal Higdon, 1967; and Mildred Williams Gunn
interview, Jan. 1987, Side 5, 9.

16. Grace Hefner file, undated interview, 3; Grace, quoted in Boyd, My FeUow Ameri-
cans, 40; and Grace Hefner interview, Dec. 1986.

17. Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 1987, 58-60; Keith Hefner interview with
Lynch/Frost Productions, 1; Keith Hefner interview with Hal Higdon, 1967.

18. A vast literature on Victorian culture and its traditions includes Daniel Walker Howe,
ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia, 1976); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and
Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New
Haven, 1982); and John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-
Century America (New York, 1990).

19. Salient works on cultural change in the early 1900s include Warren Susman,
Culture as History: The Transformation of American Culture in the Twentieth
Century (New York, 1984); T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization:
Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” in
Jackson Lears and Richard Fox, eds.. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays
in American History, 1880-1980 (New York, 1983); Lary May, Screening Out
the Past: The Rirth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago,
1983); John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century
(New York, 1978); and Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the
American Century (New York, 2005).

20. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003; Keith Hefner interview with Lynch/Frost Productions, 1;
Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 4-5; and Mildred Williams Gunn interview,
Jan. 1987, Side 5, 10.

21. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003, and Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 1, 3, 5-6.

22. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003; Grace Hefner interview, June 30, 1989, 4-5; “Other Voices;
Keith Hefner,” Keith Hefner file; Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 4; and
Grace Hefner interview, 1986, 29-30.

23. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003; “Conversations of Hef and Keith on Sex and Repression,” March
27, 1990, Keith Hefner file, 1-2; “Other Voices: Keith Hefner,” Keith Hefner file.

24. Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 1, 67; interview with Grace Hefner, HH,
and Keith Hefner, 1986, Grace Hefner file, 26.

25. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003; Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 14; Grace Hefner
interview, undated, 5; and HH, quoted in Marilyn Cole, “The Oldest Swinger in
Town,” Times Magazine (London), Nov. 1, 2003, 29.

26. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

27. Keith Hefner interview with Lynch/Frost Productions, 5, and Keith Hefner inter-
view with Leo Janos, 32, 28.

28. Grace Hefner interview, undated, 3; Grace Hefner interview, June 30, 1989, 14-15;
and Grace Hefner, Reinembering, 75.

NOTES TO PAGES 22-32

457

29. Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About
Children (New York, 2003), 5. See also Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The
Education of American Mothers (New Haven, 1998).

30. See the following three articles by Steven L. Schlossman: “Perils of Populariza-
tion: The Founding of Parents’ Magazine,” in Alice B. Smuts and John W. Hagen,
eds.. History of Research in Child Development (Monographs of the Society for
Research in Child Development), Vol. 50 (1986), 65-67, 77; “The Formative Era
in American Parent Education: Overview and Interpretation,” in Ron Haskins and
Diane Adams, eds., Parent Education and Public Policy (Norwood, NJ, 1983),
10-20, 25-32; and “Before Home Start: Notes Toward a History of Parent Educa-
tion in America, 1897-1929,” Harvard Educational Review, Aug. 1976, 452-465.

31. Undated letter from Grace to grade school teacher and 1934 letter to grade school
teacher, both in HS, Vol. 25, and Grace Hefner interview, undated, 4.

32. Grace Hefner interview, undated, 6; Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 30;
Keith Hefner interview with Lynch/Frost Productions, 1; and Grace, quoted in
Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans (New York, 1970), 41.

33. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003, and Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 33-34, 62.

34. HH interview with the author, Nov. 6, 2003, and Grace, quoted in Malcolm Boyd,
My Fellow Americans (New York, 1970), 43.

35. Court of the Fourth Judicial District of the State of Colorado, 1931, and District
Attorney’s Information Sheets, J. M. Hefner case, Carson County Clerks Office,
documents in HP; HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003. See also Grace Hefner interview, 1986,
38-39; Grace Hefner interview, June 30, 1989, 45, 47-48; and Keith Hefner inter-
view with Leo Janos, 9.

36. HH letter to “Dear Folks,” dated Sept. 26, 1948, HP; Mildred Williams Gunn
interview, Jan. 1987, Side 5, 11; and HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

37. Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, Tape 1, Side 1, 6, and Side 7, 1-2;
Grace, quoted in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans (New York, 1970), 45; and
Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 21-22.

38. Grace, quoted in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 42 — 43; interview with
Grace Hefner, HH, and Keith Hefner, 1986, Grace Hefner file, 21; Remembering,
74-75; and HS, Vol. 25.

39. Grace, quoted in My Fellow Americans, 42-43; HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003; Keith Hefner
interview with Lynch/Frost Productions, 5; and “Other Voices: Keith Hefner,”
Keith Hefner file.

40. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003, and HS, Vol. 25.

41. Ibid.

42. HHIA, Nov. 6 and Nov. 8, 2003.

43. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

44. HS, Vols. 27, 29, and 1.

45. HS, Vols. 28 and 1, and Jim Brophy, “Other Voices,” 2, 4.

46. HS, Vols. 5 and 3, and Jim Brophy, “Other Voices,” 6.

47. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003, and HS, Vol. 7.

48. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003; Janie Sellers to HH, May 24, 1987, Janie Sellers file, HP; and
HS, Vols. 4 and 7.

49. HS, Vol. 1, and HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

50. HS, Vol. 26; Jim Brophy, “Other Voices,” 4, 3; HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003; and HS,
Vol. 5.

51. HS, Vol. 1 and 4, and HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

52. HS, Vols. 26, 28, 30, and HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003.

53. “A Tragedy of Youth,” Life, June 6, 1938; HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003; and Grace Hefner
interview, 8-9.

458

NOTES TO PAGES 32-46

54. HHIA, Nov. 6, 2003; Keith Hefner interview #85-58, 4—5; Grace Hefner interview, 6;
and HS, Vol. 26. On the Petty Girls and Vargas Girls, see James R. Petersen, The
Century of Sex: Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution, 1900-1999 (New York,
1999), 126, 167.

55. Jim Brophy, “Other Voices,” 5; Janie Borson Sellers interview in Janie Sellers file;
and HH cartoon dated Jan. 8, 1944, in HS, Vol. 7.

56. HHIA, Nov. 6 and Nov. 8, 2003.

CHAPTER 2. BOOT CAMP, COLLEGE, AND KINSEY

1. HS, Vol. 8, and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

2. Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, Side 5, 3-4, and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

3. HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003, and Millie Rohrbach interview, Oct. 1989, Tape 1-B, 21-22.

4. HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

5. HS, Vol. 9.

6. HS, Vols. 9-11.

7. The letter is in HS, Vol. 11.

8. Ibid.; Keith Hefner interview with Leo Janos, 1987, 57; and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

9. HS, Vols. 12-13.

10. HS, Vols. 14-24.

11. HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003, and HS, Vols. 14-24. The “Atomic Age” quote is in Vol. 22.

12. See the wartime letters from HH to Mildred Williams in the Millie Gunn file, HP.

13. HS, Vols. 12, 13, 9-11, and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

14. HS, Vols. 31434.

15. HS, Vols. 35-36, HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

16. HS, Vols. 36-38, and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

17. HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

18. HS, Vol. 38, and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

19. HS, Vol. 36, and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

20. HS, Vol. 41, and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

21. HS, Vol. 38, and Bob Preuss interview with Leo Janos, 1987.

22. HS, Vol. 43; Bob Preuss interview with Leo Janos, 1987; and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

23. The play is contained in HS, Vol. 41.

24. HH letter to “Dear Folks,” dated Oct 11, 1948, HP.

25. HS, Vol. 35, especially HH to Janie Borson Sellers, dated Aug. 5, 1946.

26. Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, Tape 1, Side 1, 1-2, 18; Millie Rohrbach
interview with Murray Fisher, Oct. 1989, 1-2; and HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003.

27. Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, Side 1, 16-17, and Side 5, 15-16;
HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003; and HS, Vol. 41.

28. Millie Rohrbach interview with Murray Fisher, Oct. 1989, 1-2; HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003;
Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, Tape 1, Side 1, 10, 18, and Tape 1,
Side 2, 1-2.

29. Regina Markell Morantz, “The Scientist as Sex Crusader: Alfred C. Kinsey and
American Culture,” American Quarterly (Winter 1977), 564. See also James H.
Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (New York, 1997).

30. Morantz, “Sex Crusader,” 568-575, 582-583.

31. Morantz, “Sex Crusader,” 575-582, and Time, August 24, 1953.

32. HH to Janie Borson Sellers, dated Aug. 5, 1946, HS, Vol. 35.

33. HS, Vols. 40, 42, 36, 38.

34. HS, Vols. 41 and 42.

35. Bob Preuss interview with Leo Janos, 1987, and Mildred Williams Gunn interview,
Jan. 1987, Side 5, 12, 15.

36. Hefners review is in HS, Vol. 41 .

NOTES TO PAGES 47-59

459

37. HS.Vol.42.

38. Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, Tape 1, Side 1, 10-11, and HHIA,
Nov. 8, 2003.

39. HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003, and Millies explanation of the affair in Mildred Williams
Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, Tape 1, Side 2, 2; Tape 1, Side 1, 17; Tape 1, Side 5,
18, 20. Young Hefner would have been truly devastated if he knew the truth — that
Millie had sex with the coach many times, that she enjoyed it very much, and
that she went back and continued the affair even after confessing. Hefner would
not learn this until many years later.

40. HHIA on Nov. 8, 2003, and May 26, 2004.

41. HHs note can be found in HS, Vol. 24.

CHAPTER 3. THE TIE THAT BINDS

1. HH to “Dear Folks,” Sept. 26, 1948, HP.

2. HS, Vol. 44, and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

3. HH, “Hugh Hefner Story” memo dated Sept. 12, 1995, and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

4. HS, Vols. 44, 46, 47, and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

5. HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004; HH letter dated Christmas 1951 in HS, Vol. 49; and HH,
“Hugh Hefner Story” memo dated Sept. 12, 1995.

6. Ibid., and HH letter dated Jan. 1, 1953, in HS, Vol. 51.

7. HH note dated Sept. 1949, in HS, Vol. 46.

8. Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, and HS, Vols. 44 and 46.

9. HS, Vol. 47, and Millie Gunn interview with Leo Janos, Jan. 1987.

10. Chicago Daily Tribune, April 4, 1951, and Chicago Herald-American, April 16,
1951, in HS, Vol. 48, and HH letter dated March 1951, HS, Vol. 48.

11. HH letters dated June 1, 1951, and Aug. 19, 1951, in HS, Vol. 49.

12. HH letter dated Christmas 1951, HS, Vol. 49; HH letter dated May 1, 1952, HS,
Vol. 50; and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

13. HHIA, Nov. 8, 2003, and Jan. 3, 2004.

14. HH, quoted in Richard Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms. (1962), 404-405.

15. Ibid., 406-407; “Playboy Interview; Ayn Rand,” Playboy, March 1964; and HHIA,
Jan. 7,2004.

16. HH, “Sex Rehavior and the U.S. Law,” in HP, 4, 73-77.

17. HH memo, June 17, 1987, in HP, and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

18. HH, quoted in Richard Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms. (1962), 406-407, and
HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

19. HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004; Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, Side 5, 11; and
HH Christmas 1950 Letter, HS, Vol. 47.

20. HS, Vols. 50 and 51; HH, “Hugh Hefner Story” memo dated Sept. 12, 1995, in HP;
Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987; and HHIA, Jan. 23, 2004.

21. HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

22. HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004; Millie Rohrbach interview, Oct. 1989; and Eldon Sellers,
undated memoir, Eldon Sellers file, HP.

23. Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987, and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

24. Eldon Sellers memoir; HS, Vol. 51; HH, “Hugh Hefner Story” memo dated Sept.
12, 1995, in HP, 11; and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

25. Millie Rohrbach interview, Oct. 1989; letter dated May 1, 1952, HS, Vol. 50; HS,
Vol. 51; and Eldon Sellers memoir.

26. Millie Rohrbach interview, Oct. 1989; Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987;
and Eldon Sellers memoir.

27. Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987 ; Eldon Sellers memoir; Millie Rohrbach
interview, Oct. 1989.

460

NOTES TO PAGES 60-76

28. Eldon Sellers memoir.

29. Ibid.

30. Eldon Sellers memoir, and Mildred Williams Gunn interview, Jan. 1987.

31. Eldon Sellers memoir, and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

32. “Hugh Hefner Story,” 11, and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

33. HS, Vol. 51, and HH, “Hugh Hefner Story,” 11.

34. Cartoon segments dated Aug. 6, 1944, in HS, Vol. 12; “Hugh Hefner Story,” 11-12;
and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

35. HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

36. “Other Voices; Eldon Sellers,” Eldon Sellers file, HP, and cartoon dated March
1953, in HS, Vol. 52.

37. HS,Vol. 52.

38. HS, Vol. 52; Millie Rohrbach interview, Oct. 1989; and “Notes from Interview with
Burt Zollo,” Aug. 18, 1988, Burt Zollo file, HP.

39. “Hugh Hefner Story,” 12-13; “Notes from Interview with Burt Zollo”; letter to
parents dated Sept. 5, 1953, in HS, Vol. 52; Millie Rohrbach interview, Oct. 1989;
and Eldon Sellers memoir.

40. HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004; “Hugh Hefner Story,” 13; “Art Paul interview with Leo Janos,
1986, HP; and “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 241-243.

41. HS, Vol. 50; “Hugh Hefner Story,” 12; and HH, “Golden Dreams,” Playboy, Jan.
1994,121.

42. HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004; HS, Vol. 52; “Golden Dreams,” 265; and “Art Paul interview
with Leo Janos, 1986, HP.

CHAPTER 4. HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND TITILLATE PEOPLE

1. HH, “Golden Dreams,” Playboy, Jan. 1994, 271, and his letter to posterity dated
Jan. 1954, in HS, Vol. 53.

2. “Golden Dreams,” 271-272.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., 270-271, and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

5. Playboy, undated first issue, 3.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 17-19.

8. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York, 1993), 116-130, 173-187; Kenneth
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York,
1985); “What a Country!” Fortune, Oct. 1956; David Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago,
1954); and “Special Issue: The Good Life,” Life, Dec. 28, 1959, 13-14.

9. See Elaine Tyler May, Homeivard Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
(New York, 1988). The quote appears on p. 11.

10. The classic analysis of this transformation is Warren I. Susman, “‘Personality’ and
the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in his Culture as History (New York,
1984), 271-285.

11. See Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1991), for an
interesting analysis of this trend.

12. See the essays in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age
of the Cold War (Chicago, 1988), for an exploration of many of these dissenting
impulses.

13. HH letter to posterity, Jan. 1954, in HS, Vol. 53, and HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

14. HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

15. “An Impolite Interview with Hugh Hefner,” Realist, May 1961, 11.

16. Letter from Ray Russell, Playboy Associate Editor, published in the April 1954
Writer’s Digest, in HS, Vol. 53, and “The Good Life,” Playboy, Sept. 1955, 63.

NOTES TO PAGES 77-87 461

17. “Playbill,” Playboy, Nov. 1954, 2, and “They Call Me Playboy,” 1955 ad solicitation
published in Advertising Age, in HS, Vol. 56.

18. “The Playboy Reader,” Playboy, Sept. 1955, 36-37.

19. “What is a Playboy?” Playboy, Apr. 1956, 73.

20. HH, quoted in Alan Whitney, “Playboy: Sex on a Skyrocket,” Chicago, Oct. 1955, 37.

21. “Nudity and the Foreign Film,” Playboy, Oct. 1954, 40-44.

22. HH, quoted in “Playboy: Sex on a Skyrocket,” 36-37.

23. See in Playboy: Bob Norman [Burt Zollo], “Miss Gold-digger of 1953” (undated
first issue), and “Dear Playboy,” Jan. 1954; Burt Zollo, “Open Season on Bachelors,”
June 1954; and Jay Smith, “A Vote for Polygamy,” July 1955.

24. See in Playboy: Julien Dedman, “That Brooks Brothers Look,” Feb. 1954; Thomas
Mario, “Pleasures of the Oyster,” April 1954); and Thomas Mario, “How to Play
with Fire,” July 1954.

25. See in Playboy: Dave Brubeck, “The New Jazz Audience,” Aug. 1955; “Playbill”
and “Playboy After Hours,” Nov. 1955; and “Playbill,” Oct. 1956.

26. See in Playboy: Shepherd Mead, “How to Apply for a Job,” May 1954; Thomas
Mario, “Is She Your Kind of Dish?” Oct. 1954; and Evelyn Waugh, “The Death of
Painting,” Aug. 1956.

27. Ray Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451,” serialized in Plaijboy, March-May 1954; Charles
Beaumont, “Black Country,” Playboy, Sept. 1954; and letter from Ray Russell,
Playboy Associate Editor, published in the April 1954 Writer’s Digest, in HS,
Vol. 53. For other examples of Playboy’s early fiction, see W. Somerset Maugham,
“Appearance and Reality,” Oct. 1954; John Steinbeck, “The Ears of Johnny Bear,”
Jan. 1955; and James Jones, “The King,” Oct. 1955.

28. Jackson Lears, “A Matter of Taste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a Mass-
Consumption Society,” in May, Recasting America, 38-57.

29. HH letter to posterity, Jan. 1955, in HS, Vol. 55; HH letter to posterity, summer
1955, in HS, Vol. 56; and HH letter to investors, December, 1956, in HS, Vol. 57.

30. HH letter to posterity, Jan. 1954, in HS, Vol. 53.

31. Eldon Sellers memoir (undated), Eldon Sellers file, HP, and HH letter to posterity,
Jan. 1955.

32. HH, quoted in “Playboy: Sex on a Skyrocket,” Chicago, Oct. 1955, 37; transcript
of HH on TV show Night Beat, with Mike Wallace, fall 1956, HS, Vol. 58; and HH
letter to posterity, Jan. 1955.

. HH letter to posterity, Jan. 1955.

. HH letter to posterity, Jan. 1954, and HH letter to posterity, summer 1955.

. “Playboy: Sex on a Skyrocket,” Chicago, Oct. 1955, 35, and HH, quoted on 37;
“Sassy Newcomer,” Time, Sept. 24, 1956; “For Young City Guys,” Newsweek,
Nov. 7, 1955; and 1956 Night Beat transcript.

36. “Playboy Goes to Court Challenging Ban by Summerfield,” New York Post,
Nov. 18, 1955; “Playboy, Post Office in 2nd-class Hassle,” Printer’s Ink, Dec. 2,
1955; and “Press Release,” Nov. 1955, in HP.

37. Articles in the Daily Northwestern: “Playboy Gets the Axe in Campus Bookstore,”
Jan. 13, 1956; “A Story of People Who Weren’t There,” Jan. 30, 1956; and HH,
“Playboy Editor Argues Against Bookstore Ban,” Jan. 19, 1956.

CHAPTER 5. HEDONISM, INC.

1. Marge Pitner interview, July 8, 1988, HP.

2. Marge Pitner interview, July 8, 1988, HP, and Patricia Pappangelis interview with
Trikilis Productions, Pat Pappas file, HP.

3. John Mastro interview with Trikilis Productions, Mastro file, HP, and Vince Tajiri
interview with Murray Fisher, Dec. 18, 1989, Tajiri file, HP.

462

NOTES TO PAGES 87-94

4. Art Paul interview with Leo Janos (1986), Art Paul File, HP, pp, 12-16.

5. “Arthur Paul and Friend "Journal of Commercial Art, Aug. 1960, n.p., and Richard
Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms. 1962, HP, 242-244. Gehman’s unpublished
manuscript relies heavily on interviews, from which he quotes extensively.

6. Art Paul interview with Leo Janos, 1986, Art Paul file, HP, 2-4, and “Arthur Paul
and Friend,” Journal of Commercial Art, Aug. 1960, n.p.

7. Ray Russell to Leo Janos, Jan. 20, 1987, Ray Russell file, HP, and Gehman, quoting
Russell in “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 438—442.

8. Ray Russell to Leo Janos, Jan. 20, 1987, Ray Russell file, HP.

9. Ray Russell to Leo Janos, Jan. 20, 1987, Ray Russell file, HP, and Russell, quoted
in Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 443—444.

10. Vince Tajiri, undated interview, Vince Tajiri file, HP, and “Famed Nisei Photogra-
pher Vincent Tajiri Dies,” Rafu Shimpo, Feb. 9, 1993.

11. Vince Tajiri, undated interview, Vince Tajiri file, HP, and Tajiri, quoted in Gehman,
“ The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 244-247.

12. HS, Vol. 57, and HH to Keith and Rae Hefner, April 2, 1956, Keith Hefner
file, HP.

13. Ray Russell to Leo Janos, Jan. 20, 1987, Ray Russell file, HP, and Spectorsky, quoted
in Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 218-220.

14. Spectorsky to HH, Feb. 18, 1956, HP; HH to Keith and Rae Hefner, April 2, 1956,
Keith Hefner file, HP; Murray Fisher, quoting Spectorsky when interviewing
Arlene Rouras, May 10, 1989, 18-19, HP; and Spectorsky memo to Vic Lownes,
May 14, 1956, HP.

15. Spectorsky interview, quoted in Richard Lehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962,
221-224, and interview with Theo Spectorsky, Theo Spectorsky file, HP. Hefner
noted Spectorsky s influence in HHIA, May 2004.

16. Theo Spectorsky interview with Murray Fisher, May 8, 1989, HP.

17. Theo Spectorsky interview with Murray Fisher, May 8, 1989; Arlene Rouras inter-
view with Murray Fisher, May 10, 1989, 5-6; Murray Fisher, quoted in Gehman,
“The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 227-228; and “A Revealing Interview with A. C.
Spectorsky,” Word Business, April 1967, 45.

18. Spectorsky, quoted in Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 229, and Theo
Spectorsky interview with Murray Fisher, May 8, 1989.

19. Theo Spectorsky interview with Murray Fisher, May 8, 1989; Arlene Rouras inter-
view with Murray Fisher, May 10, 1989, 16-18. The Trilling story was related by
Playboy editor Walter Goodman and repeated in Thomas Weyr, Reaching for
Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America (New York, 1978), 39.

20. Spectorsky, quoted in Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 193; Spec to Hef
memo on “The Manipulators,” Sept. 25, 1957, HP; “Highlights of Interview with
Ray Russell,” June 8, 1989, Ray Russell file, HP.

21. Theo Spectorsky interview with Murray Fisher, May 8, 1989; “Highlights of Inter-
view with Ray Russell,” June 8, 1989, Ray Russell file, HP; and Spectorsky, quoted
in the Rev. Malcolm Royd, “The Late Spectorsky on Playboy," Variety, Feb. 2,
1972.

22. “Gleanings from Conversation with Eldon Sellers,” Jan. 3, 1989, Eldon Sellers
file, HP.

23. Victor Lownes interview with Lynch/Frost, April 13, 1991, Victor Lownes file, HP,
and “Gleanings from Conversation with Eldon Sellers,” Jan. 3, 1989, Eldon Sellers
file, HP.

24. Theo Spectorsky interview with Murray Fisher, May 8, 1989; Retty Zuziak interview
with Leo Janos, 1988; and Victor Lownes interview with Murray Fisher, March 10,
1989.

NOTES TO PAGES 94-101

463

25. Lowries, quoted in Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 261-262; and Shel
Silverstein interview, with HH present, Nov. 26, 1986, Shel Silverstein file, HP.

26. Victor Lownes interview with Murray Fisher, March 10, 1989, HP; and Eldon Sell-
ers memoir, 1989, Eldon Sellers file, HP.

27. Victor Lownes interview with Murray Fisher, March 12, 1989; Dick Rosenzweig,
“Rosenzweig on Vic at Work,” Victor Lownes file, HP; “Theo Spectorsky on Anson
Mount,” Anson Mount file, HP; and “Vince Tajiri on Vic Lownes,” Vince Tajiri
file, HP.

28. Victor Lownes interview with Murray Fisher, Mar. 12, 1989, Victor Lownes file, HP,
and HH to Victor Lownes, Dec. 1959 memo, Victor Lownes file, HP.

29. Retty Zuziak interview with Leo Janos, 1988, 51; Theo Spectorsky interview with
Murray Fisher, May 8, 1989; Eleanor Rradley interview with Murray Fisher, Sept.
27, 1989; Jean Parker interview with Murray Fisher, June 14, 1989, 33; Russell
Miller, Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy (New York, 1984), 56; and “Eldon Sellers
on Vic at Work,” Victor Lownes file, HP.

30. Dick Rosenzweig, “Rosenzweig on Vic at Work,” Victor Lownes file, HP; Gehman,
“The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 257; Mike Shea, “Mike Shea on Vic,” Victor
Lownes file, HP; and HHIA, May 2004.

31. Eleanor Rradley interview with Murray Fisher, Sept. 27, 1989, HP, and Shel
Silverstein interview, with HH present, Nov. 26, 1986, HP.

32. Theo Spectorsky, Jack Kessie File, HP, and Joe Paczek on “Life at 232,” Joe Paczek
file, HP.

33. Nancy Mount interview with Murray Fisher, June 7, 1989, HP, and “Theo Spec-
torsky on Anson Mount,” Anson Mount file, HP.

34. LeRoy Neiman, Art and Lifestyle booklet, Neiman file, HP; LeRoy Neiman inter-
view with Lynch/Frost Productions, May 23, 1991, HP; “LeRoy Neiman on the
Genesis of ‘Man at His Leisure,’” Neiman file, HP; and “Other Voices: LeRoy
Neiman,” Neiman file, HP.

35. Joe Paczek on “Life at 232,” Joe Paczek file, HH Papers; HHIA, May 2004; and
HH, Memo on “The Hugh Hefner Story,” 1995, 15, HP.

36. HHIA, May 2004.

37. Arlene Rouras, undated statement, Rouras file, HP; Patricia Pappangelis interview
with Trikilis Productions, Pat Pappas file, HP; Vince Tajiri, undated statement,
Vince Tajiri file, HP; and Marge Pitner interview with Trikilis Productions, HP.

38. HHIA, May 2004; Arlene Rouras, undated statement, Rouras file, HP; John Mastro,
undated interview, John Mastro file, HP; Ernest Tucker, “The Playboy Rehind
Playboy,” Chicago American Pictorial Living, June 5, 1960; and Shel Silverstein,
undated comments, Silverstein file, HP.

39. LeRoy Neiman, undated statement, Neiman file, HP.

40. Arlene Rouras, quoted in Nina Liu, “Meet the Purist in Hef s Domain,” Copy
Editor, Dec. 1990/Jan. 1991, 5, and John Mastro, undated interview, John Mastro
file, HP.

41. Marge Pitner interview July 8, 1988, HP; Pat Pappangelis interview, July 7, 1988,
Pat Pappas file, HP; John Mastro, undated interview, John Mastro file, HP; Eldon
Sellers memoir (undated), Eldon Sellers file, HP; and Gehman, “The Fabulous
Hef” ms., 1962, 206, 207-208, HP.

42. Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 207-208, and Art Paul interview with
Leo Janos, 1986, Art Paul file, HP.

43. Art Paul interview with Leo Janos, 1986, Art Paul file, HP; Ray Russell to Leo
Janos, Jan. 20, 1987, Ray Russell file, HP; and HH and Shel Silverstein, interview
with Leo Janos, 1989, Shel Silverstein file, HP.

44. HH memo to Ray Russell, A. C. Spectorsky, Jack Kessie, Nov. 19, 1956, HP.

464

NOTES TO PAGES 102-109

45. Vince Tajiri, undated interview, Vince Tajiri file, HP; Arlene Bouras, undated
statement, Bouras file, HP; and HH memo to Fred Crawford, Apr. 2, 1957, HP.

46. HH to Perkins Bailey, Sept. 4, 1956, HP; HH memo to A. C. Spectorsky, June 21.
1956, HP; and HH memo to Ray Russell, Dec. 4, 1959, HP.

47. HH memo to Spectorsky, Oct. 9, 1956, HP, and HH memo to Spectorsky, Russell,
Kessie, June 27, 1956, HP.

48. HH to Burt Zollo, March 21, 1956, HP.

49. Jack Kessie, quoted in Weyr, Reaching for Paradise, 33; Victor Lownes inter-
view with Lynch/Frost, April 13, 1991; A. C. Spectorsky and Art Paul, quoted in
Richard Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 197, 204-205, HP; HH, quoted
in Will Jones, “Hefner’s a Playboy — and a Workhorse: In Chicago a Bit of Rome,”
Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, Feb. 26, 1961; and HHIA, May 2004.

50. “Confidential Vocational Audit of Hugh M. Hefner,” dated August 13, 1956, in HS,
Vol. 57.

51. HH memo to Fred Crawford, May 20, 1956, HP; and HH s 1959 Year-End Letter,
HS, Vol. 63.

52. Gehman, “The Fabulous Hef” ms., 1962, 206-207, and HH’s Year-End Letter, Dec.
1958, in HS, Vol. 60.

53. HHIA, May 2004.

CHAPTER 6. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

1. Transcript, HH on Mike Wallace Interview, fall 1956, HS, Vol. 58.

2. Reth Bailey has disentangled and analyzed many of the threads of the sexual revolu-
tion in her “Sexual Revolution(s),” in David Farber, ed.. The Sixties: From Memory
to History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994), 235-262, and Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge,
MA, 1999).

3. New Yorker cover, June 22, 1957, and David Cort, “Sophistication in America,”
Nation, Feb. 2, 1957, 96-97.

4. HH, “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Sept. 1963, 81; Feb. 1963, 45; and Feb.
1965, 177, and “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 65-66.

5. The secondary literature on Victorian culture is enormous, but a good starting
point is Daniel Walker Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia, 1976). See also
Jayme A. Sokolow, Eros and Modernization: Sylvester Graham, Health Reform, and
the Origins of Victorian Sexuality in America (Rutherford, NJ, 1983), and, on Com-
stock, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge
and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2002), 367-403.

6. Among many fine works on the tum-of-the-century shift away from a Victo-
rian culture of self-denial to a modem consumer culture of self-fulfillment, see
T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Thera-
peutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” in Jackson Lears and Richard
Fox, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essaijs in American History, 1880-
1980 (New York, 1983); Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture
and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago, 1983); John Kasson, Amusing the Million:
Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1978); and Lewis Erenberg,
Steppin Out: New York Nightlife and the Transfornwtion of American Culture,
1890-1930 (Chicago, 1981). Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families
in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988), provides a compelling analysis of the connec-
tions between family formulations and politics during the Cold War era.

7. See Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, 75-80, for a perceptive analysis of the sexual
orthodoxy.

8. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York, 1993), 59-61, 272-281, 455-462, 471^78,
and 576-584, discusses many sexual countercurrents in the decade.

ui 12 c3 to

NOTES TO PAGES 109-120

465

9. Alan Whitney, “Playboy: Sex on a Skyrocket,” Chicago, Oct. 1955, 36-37, and
HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004, and May 26, 2004.

10. See in Playboy: reply to readers letter, Aug. 1954, 3; Jules Archer, “Don’t Hate
Yourself in the Morning,” Aug. 1955; Harrison Case, “Contour Contact,” June 1957;
and Jay Smith, “The Big Bosom Battle,” Sept. 1955.

11. See in Playboy: “Playboys Yacht Party,” July 1957; “Playboys House Party,” May
1959; “The Girls of Hollywood,” Oct. 1960; and “Minsky in Vegas,” April 1958.

12. HH, quoted in “Sex on a Skyrocket,” 36, and Frankenstein Smith (HH pseudonym),
“Virginity,” Playboy, Sept. 1954.

13. Shepherd Mead, “The First Sap of Manhood and How It Rises,” Playboy, Dec.
1955.

14. See in Playboy: Thomas Mario, “The Breaking of the Fast: Morning Menus for
Two,” June 1957; Blake Rutherford, “The Marks of the Well-Dressed Man,” March
1957; “Playboys Penthouse Apartment,” Sept, and Oct. 1956; and “Playboy After
Hours,” Playboy, Nov. 1955.

15. HH, quoted in Hal Higdon, “Playboying Around the Clock with Hugh Hefner,”
Climax, Feb. 1962, and in transcript for the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s
radio documentary Project ’62: Playboy of the Modem World, 1962, 10, HP.

16. HH, quoted in “About the Nudes in Playboy,” 17. S. Camera, April 1962, 69, and in
Plaijboy of the Modem World transcript, 10.

17. HH, in “About the Nudes in Playboy,” April 1962, 69; HH, quoted in Hal Higdon,
“Playboying Around the Clock with Hugh Hefner,” Climax, Feb. 1962.

18. HH on Irv Kupcinet’s At Random, CBS television show, Chicago, July 3, 1962.

19. HH, “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Feb. 1965, 184.

20. HHIA, May 26, 2004, and Ivor Williams, “The Pious Pornographers,” Playboy,
Oct. 1957.

21. HH to Larry Silverstein, A. Stein and Company, Oct. 26, 1959, HP.

HH, “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Dec. 1964, 160, and Sept. 1963, 233.
HHIA, Jan. 3, 2004.

Playboy, July 1955, 27.

Playboy, Dec. 1955, 29-32; Playboy, Oct. 1956, 40-46; and Playboy, Oct.
1957,85.

26. See Ralph Stein, The Pin-Up: From 1852 to Now (Chicago, 1974); Mark Gabor, The
Pin-Up: A Modest History (New York, 1972); and Joanne Meyerowitz, “Women,
Cheesecake, and Borderline Material: Responses to Girlie Pictures in the Mid-
Twentieth Century U.S Journal of Women’s History (Fall 1996), 11-13.

27. HH on Mike Wallace Interview, and HHIA, May 26, 2004.

28. “Requirements for Playboy’s Playmate of the Month,” 1956, 1, HP, and HH to
George J. Abrams, Vice President for Advertising, Revlon Products Corp., March
23, 1956, HP.

29. HH, in “About the Nudes in Playboy,” U.S. Camera, April 1962, 70-71, and “Play-
boy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 69.

30. Joe Paczek interview with Murray Fisher, July 8, 1988, HP.

31. Playboy, Dec. 1956, 41^7.

32. Playboy, Jan. 1959, 39-43.

33. Bob Norman [Burt Zollo], “Miss Gold-digger of 1953,” Playboy, Dec. 1953, 6-8,
and Burt Zollo, “Open Season on Bachelors,” Playboy, June 1954, 37-38.

34. Jay Smith, “A Vote for Polygamy,” Playboy, July 1955, 15-16, and “Meet the Play-
boy Reader,” Playboy, April 1958, 76.

35. “An Impolite Interview with Hugh Hefner,” Realist, 14, and HH, quoted in Playboy
of the Modem World radio documentary, 1962, transcript, 13-14, HP.

36. HH, “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Feb. 1965, 176, 179-180.

466

NOTES TO PAGES 121-130

37. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Thera-
peutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” in Jackson Lears and Richard
Wightman Fox, eds.. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essaijs in American
History, 1880-1980 (New York, 1983), 4. HH is quoted in “The Playboy Philoso-
phy,” Playboy, Feb. 1963, 45.

38. HH, “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Jan. 1965, 172, and Martha Wolfenstein,
“Fun Morality: An Analysis of Recent American Child-Training Literature,” in
Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, eds., Childhood in Contemporary Cul-
tures (Chicago, 1955), 168.

39. HH, “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Feb. 1965, 179.

CHAPTER 7. AN ABUNDANT LIFE

1. “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 65, 82.

2. Vic Lownes interview with Lynch/Frost, April 13, 1991.

3. “The Men’s Shop,” Playboy, Dec. 1953.

4. David Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character
(Chicago, 1954); David Riesman, Abundance for What? and Other Essaijs (Garden
City, NY, 1964); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Roston, 1958); and
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in
Postwar America (New York, 2003), 11-15.

5. “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 66.

6. “ They Call Me Playboy,” 1955 ad solicitation in Advertising Age, HS, Vol. 56.

7. See in Playboy. “The Basic Bar,” Jan. 1958; “The Compleat Fidelitarian,” Oct.
1957; “The Stereo Scene,” Oct. 1958; “The Verities of Vino,” Oct. 1958; “The
Compleat Sports Car Stable,” April 1957; “The Playboy Sports Car,” Sept. 1960;
and “Mixing the Perfect Martini,” Sept. 1955.

8. “Playboys Penthouse Apartment,” Playboy, Sept. 1956, 53-60, and Oct. 1956,
65-70.

9. See in Playboy: Frederic A. Birmingham, “The Well-Clad Undergrad,” Sept. 1958;
Blake Rutherford, “Fashion Afoot,” March 1959; Blake Rutherford, “The Marks
for the Well-Dressed Man,” March 1957; and Robert L. Green, “A Formal Affair,”
June 1959.

10. Gretchen Edgeren, The Playboy Book : Forty Years (Los Angeles, 1994), 35, and
HH to Peter L. Postelnek of Bentley, Barnes, and Lynn, Inc., Feb. 24, 1959, HP.

11. Edgeren, Playboy Book, 35, and “Gleanings from Conversation with Eldon Sellers,”
Jan. 3, 1989, Eldon Sellers file, HP.

12. The ads listed in the previous three paragraphs were noted in the authors close
survey of the June 1959 issue of Playboy.

13. “Playboy Reader Service,” Plaijboy, Oct. 1957, 87.

14. See in Playboy: John Moss, “Playboy on Poker,” Nov. 1957; Patrick Chase, “The Art
of Travel,” May 1959; “Invitation to Yachting: Playboys Guide to Fun Afloat,” July
1959; and nightclub ads appearing in the Nov. 1959 issue.

15. See in Playboy: Richard Gehman and Robert Reisner, “Bird,” Jan. 1957; Leonard
Feather, “Ella Meets the Duke,” Nov. 1957; Robert George Reisner, “Sinatra,” Nov.
1958; and “ The 1957 Playboy All-Stars,” Feb. 1957.

16. See in Playboy: Ed Pazdur, “Boxing 1956,” Feb. 1956; Anson Mount, “Playboy’s
Pigskin Preview,” Sept. 1958; and “Yuletide for the Playboy Sportsman,” Dec. 1958.
See also HH, “The Magazine 1955-1959,” Sept. 16, 1987, 18, on the “Pigskin Pre-
view,” HP.

17. See in Playboy: Hollis Alpert and Charles Beaumont, “The Horror of It All,” March
1959; Charles Beaumont, “Chaplin: The Chronicle of a Man and His Genius,”

NOTES TO PAGES 131-139

467

March 1960; Richard Gehman, “Charming Billy,” Dec. 1960; and Wolcott Gibbs
and Ward Morehouse, “Broadway: The Season Just Past, the Season to Come,”
Dec. 1956.

18. “Silverstein: Sketches from the Satirical Pen of a Talented New Artist,” Playboy,
Aug. 1956, 52, and “The Sick Little World of Jules Feiffer,” Playboy, Aug. 1958,
25-27. For a sampling of these cartoonists, see Playboy. 50 Years of Cartoons
(San Francisco, 2004).

19. “Playbill,” Playboy, July 1957, 2, and “Playbill,” Playboy, Jan. 1958, 2.

20. HH, “The Magazine, 1955-1959,” Sept. 16, 1987, 6, 16, HP; HHs 1959 Year-End
Letter, HS, Vol. 63; and HHs 1960 Year-End Letter, HS, Vol. 65.

21. HH letter to posterity, July 1957, HS, Vol. 58. For inside pictures of the financial
crisis, see “Highlights of March 2, 1989, Eldon Sellers Interview,” Eldon Sellers file,
HP, and John Mastro interview with Murray Fisher, HP.

22. “Meet the Playboy Reader,” Playboy, April 1958.

23. “What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?” subscription ads in Playboy: May 1958, 82;
Nov. 1958, 98; and Jan. 1959, 82.

24. “The Beat Mystique,” Playboy, Feb. 1958, with Herbert Gold, “What It Is —
Whence It Came,” 20, 84-87; Sam Boal, “Cool Swinging in New York,” 21, 26, 50;
and Noel Clad, “A Frigid Frolic in Frisco,” 21, 22, 74-75. Also Jack Kerouac, “The
Origins of the Beat Generation,” Playboy, June 1959, 31-32, 42, 79. A descriptive
account of the Beats can be found in David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York,
1993), 295-307, while more scholarly analyses appear in Steven Watson, The Birth
of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960 (New York,
1995), and Preston Whaley, Blows Like a Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and
Markets in the Transformation ofU.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2004).

25. “Beat Playmate,” Playboy, July 1959.

26. HH in “Playbill,” Playboy, Dec. 1958, 3, on the fifth anniversary of the magazine,
repeated in HH letter for posterity, Dec. 1958, HS, Vol. 60.

27. HHIA, Jan. 3 and May 26, 2004.

28. HH to Homer Hargrove, May 13, 1960, HS, Vol. 64, and HH in Project ’62: Play-
boy of the Modem World, 1962, transcript of radio documentary broadcast by the
Canadian Broadcasting Company, HP.

29. HH, quoted in Hal Higdon, “Playboying Around the Clock with Hugh Hefner,”
Climax, Feb. 1962.

30. HH to Jean Shepherd, June 8, 1961, HP, and HH, quoted in Higdon, “Playboying
Around the Clock.”

31. See a number of articles from the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago American in
April and May 1959, and “Playboy Mag Scrams Jazz Fest at Soldier Field,” Variety,
May 20, 1959, all in HS, Vol. 61, for background on the booking problems with the
event. HH noted the connection between the Playboy Jazz Festival and the Upbeat
Generation in “ The Magazine 1955-1959,” Sept. 16, 1987, 22, HP.

32. See the raft of newspaper and magazine articles in HS, Vol. 62.

33. See “Chi Jazz Fest: A Plus for Playboy,” Variety, undated, and Lownes s statement
in undated article from Billboard, both in HS, Vol. 62.

34. HH, quoted in Bill Davidson, “Czar of the Bunny Empire,” Saturday Evening Post,
Apr. 28, 1962, 34.

35. For an insightful description of the Kitchen Debates, see Elaine Tyler May, Home-
ward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988), 16-18.

36. HH in Project ’62: Playboy of the Modem World, 1962, transcript of radio docu-
mentary broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, HP.

37. HHIA, May 26, 2004, and HH, “Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Jan. 1965, 171-172.

38. HH, “Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Jan. 1965, 172, and HHIA, May 26, 2004.

468

NOTES TO PAGES 139-146

39. HH memo to Ray Russell, Dec. 4, 1959, HR and HH to Homer Hargrove Jr., May
15, 1960, HP.

40. See the raft of newspaper clippings about this incident in HS, Vol. 62.

41. HH s rejoinder in “Dear Playboy,” Playboy, July 1960, 6.

42. HH, “The Hugh Hefner Story,” Sept. 12, 1995, 16-17, HP, and internal FRI memo
dated Oct. 27, 1955, and copy of post office memo dated Feb. 11, 1955, both in
HH/Playboy FRI file released under Freedom of Information Act.

43. HH letters to posterity, dated May 1 and Sept. 1952, both in HS, Vol. 50; HH to
Homer Hargrove Jr., May 15, 1960, HP; and HH, “Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy,
Jan. 1965, 171.

44. HH memo titled “Jules Feiffer, Mort Sahl, and Lenny Rruce,” Dec. 17, 1987, 1-20,
HP; Rolf Malcolm, “A Real Free-Form Guy: The Egghead Humor of Mort Sahl,”
Playboy, June 1957; and Larry Siegel, “Rebel with a Caustic Cause: Sick Comic
Lenny Rruce,” Playboy, Feb. 1959.

45. Ibid.

46. See in Playboy: Vance Packard, “The Manipulators,” Dec. 1957; John Keats, “Eros
and Unreason in Detroit,” Aug. 1958; Ralph Ginzburg, “The Cult of the Aged
Leader,” August 1959; and “The Contaminators: A Statement by the Editors of
Playboy,” October 1959.

47. HH to Ronald Reagan, May 13, 1960, HP.

48. Ernest Tucker, “ The Playboy Rehind Playboy,” Chicago American Pictorial Living,
June 5, 1960.

49. HH, quoted in Rill Davidson, “Czar of the Runny Empire,” Saturday Evening Post,
Apr. 28, 1962, 36.

50. HH, quoted in Malcolm Royd, My Fellow Americans (New York, 1970), 60, and HH
in “About the Nudes in Playboy,” U.S. Camera, April 1962, 68.

CHAPTER 8. LIVING THE FANTASY

1. “Highlights of Interview with Ray Russell,” June 8, 1989, Ray Russell file, HP.

2. Vic Lownes, Lynch/F rost interview, April 13, 1991, HE

3. Daniel Roorstin, The Image: Or, What Happened to the American Dream
(New York, 1962), 57, and Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of
Celebrity in America (Chicago, 2000 [1985]), 29. A fine book that discusses the
broader historical evolution of fame is Leo Rraudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame
and Its History (New York, 1986).

4. HHIA, May 26, 2004; Shelly Kasten, “Other Voices,” HP; Skip Krask, “Other
Voices,” HP; and Don Adams, 1989 interview, HP.

5. Kasten, “Other Voices,” and Krask, “Other Voices.”

6. Arlene Rouras on Ray Russell, Arlene Rouras file, HP; Bev Chamberlain interview
with Murray Fisher, Oct. 26, 1989; HH, “Personal Reflections on the 1950s,” Oct.
5, 1987, HP; “Gleanings from Conversation with Eldon Sellers,” Jan. 3, 1989, Eldon
Sellers file, HP; Marge Pitner interview, HP; Arlene Bouras on Joe Paczek, Arlene
Bouras file, HP; and “Highlights of Interview with Ray Russell,” June 8, 1989, Ray
Russell file, HP.

7. The record of these liaisons is in HS, Vols. 57, 58, 59. See also HH, “The Maga-
zine, 1955-1959,” Sept. 16, 1987, 9, HP; HH, “Personal Reflections on the 1950s,”
Oct. 5, 1987, HP; Bev Chamberlain interview with Murray Fisher, Oct. 26, 1989;
Janie Borson Sellers interview, Janie Sellers file, HP; and HH to Larry DuBois and
Murray Fisher, Oct. 24, 1989, HP.

8. Art Paul interview with Leo Janos, 1986, Art Paul file, HP, and Marge Pitner
interview, HP.

>2 cj j§

NOTES TO PAGES 147-154

469

9. Millie Gunn interview with Leo Janos, Jan. 1987; and HH to Keith and Rae Hefner,
April 2, 1956, Keith Hefner file, HP.

10. HH s 1959 Year-End Letter, HS, Vol. 63; Marge Pitner interview, HP; HH, quoted
in “Betty Zuziak,” Betty Zuziak file, HP; and Betty Zuziak interview with Leo Janos,
1988.

11. HH, “Sophistication in America,” Dec. 4, 1989, HP; HS, Vols. 59 and 60; and
Playboy, Dec. 1958, 51-54.

12. Joni Mattis interview with Leo Janos, 1988, and HH, interoffice memo, March 1,
1990, Joni Mattis file, HP.

13. Betty Zuziak interview with Leo Janos, 1988; Joni Mattis interview with Leo Janos,
1988; and Connie Chancellor, “Other Voices,” HP.

14. Betty Zuziak interview with Leo Janos, 1988, and Joni Mattis interview with Murray
Fisher, Jan. 19, 1990, 11-18.

15. Betty Zuziak interview with Leo Janos, 1988, 83.

16. Marge Pitner interview, HP, and Betty Zuziak interview with Leo Janos, 1988.

17. Joni Mattis interview with Murray Fisher, Jan. 19, 1990; Betty Zuziak interview with
Leo Janos, 1988; and Joni Mattis interview with Leo Janos, 1988.

18. Marge Pitner interview, HP, and Betty Zuziak interview with Leo Janos, 1988; Joni
Mattis interview with Murray Fisher, Jan. 19, 1990; Zuziak interview with Leo Janos,
1988; Joni Mattis interview with Leo Janos, 1988; Mattis interview with Fisher,
Jan. 19, 1990.

19. Millie Gunn interview with Leo Janos, Jan. 1987, and Marge Pitner interview,
HP.

20. HH letter to posterity, July 1957, HS, Vol. 58; Millie Rohrbach interview with Murray
Fisher, Oct. 1989; and Millie Gunn Rohrbach interview with Leo Janos, 1986.

21. “Hugh Hefner Sued by Wife for Divorce,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 19, 1959,
and HH’s 1959 Year-End Letter, HS, Vol. 63.

. “Playbill,” Playboy, June 1957, 2-3.

. HH to Leo Janos, memo on “The Magazine 1955-1959,” Sept. 16, 1987, 19, HP.

. “Playbill” and “The Hildebrand Rarity,” Playboy, March 1960; “Chronology for
Ian Fleming/James Bond/Sean Connery,” Oct. 12, 1990, HP; “James Bonds Girls,”
Playboy, Nov. 1965, 133; and HHIA, Nov. 11, 2004. See also Gretchen Edgren,
The Playboy Book: Forty Years (Los Angeles, 1994), 76, 103. Ian Fleming was the
subject of the “Playboy Interview” in Playboy, Dec. 1964, while Sean Connery
appeared in the same venue in Nov. 1965. Serializations of James Bond novels
began in Playboy as follows: On Pier Majesty’s Secret Service in April 1963; You
Only Live Twice in April 1964; and The Man with the Golden Gun in April 1965.

25. Robert George Reisner, “Sinatra,” Playboy, Nov. 1958, and Robert Legare, “Meet-
ing at the Summit: Sinatra and His Buddies Bust ’Em Up in Vegas,” Playboy, June
1960. Sinatra would appear as the subject of a Playboy Interview in Playboy, Feb.
1963.

26. HHIA, Nov. 11, 2004, and HH, “My Card File— Mid-1959 to Jan. 1961,” Dec. 21,
1987, 15-17.

27. HHIA, Nov. 11, 2004; HH, “My Card File— Mid-1959 to Jan. 1961,” Dec. 21, 1987,
19; and HH, memo titled “If You Don’t Swing,” Feb. 14, 1990, 15.

28. HS, Vol. 66, and HH, “My Card File— Mid-1959 to Jan. 1961,” Dec. 21, 1987, 25.

29. Ad titled “It Pays to Know” for Walther Motor Company, Fall 1959, HS, Vol. 62,
and HH to Howard Lederer, March 2, 1959, HP.

30. Ernest Tucker, “ The Playboy Behind Playboy,” Chicago American Pictorial Living,
June 5, 1960; Will Jones, “Hefner’s a Playboy — and a Workhorse: In Chicago a Bit
of Rome,” Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, Feb. 26, 1961; and wire service newspaper
articles in HS, Vol. 68.

85S

470

NOTES TO PAGES 155-163

31. Ray Russell to Leo Janos, Feb. 2, 1987, HP; and Betty Zuziak interview with Leo
Janos, 1988, 10, HP.

32. Betty Zuziak interview with Leo Janos, 1988, 63-64, 85.

33. HH, “My Card File— Mid-1959 to Jan. 1961,” Dec. 21, 1987, 2; and HH memo to
Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, April 3, 1989.

34. Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 13, 1959.

35. HS.Vol. 62.

36. HH, “My Card File— Mid-1959 to Jan. 1961,” Dec. 21, 1987, and Victor Lownes,
quoted in Sales Management, Oct. 16, 1959, 108.

37. HH memo to Dan Schuffman, Dec. 8, 1959, HP; and Vic Lownes interview with
Murray Fisher, March 12, 1989.

38. HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, Oct. 24, 1989; and HH memo to
Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, April 17, 1989.

39. HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, Oct. 24, 1989; “Playboys TV
Penthouse,” Playboy, March 1960, 41-43; ad in Playboy, Jan. 1960, 6; and ad in
TV Guide, Dec. 26, 1959, 28.

40. Chicago Daily Tribune and Variety clippings, HS, Vol. 63, and HH memo to Larry
DuBois and Murray Fisher, Oct. 24, 1989.

41. HS, Vols. 63, 64, and 65, and “Playboys More Polished,” Chicago Sun-Times, Sept.
21, 1960.

42. HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, Oct. 24, 1989, HP, and Gretchen
Edgren, Inside the Playboy Mansion (Los Angeles, 1998), 8-9.

43. HHs 1959 Year-End Letter, HS, Vol. 63, and Theo Spectorsky recollection,
unmarked document in Victor Lownes file, HP.

44. HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, Oct. 24, 1989, 18-20, and HH,
“The Hugh Hefner Story,” Sept. 12, 1995, 22-23.

45. Ibid., and Edgren, Inside the Playboy Mansion, 66-67.

46. HH, “My Card File— Mid-1959 to Jan. 1961,” Dec. 21, 1987, 11, 14-15; and HH,
“ The Hugh Hefner Story,” Sept. 12, 1995, 22-23.

47. Kathryn Loring, “A Bachelors Dream,” Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, March 5,
1961; “The Boss of Taste City,” Time, March 24, 1961, 55-56; Bill Davidson,
“Czar of the Bunny Empire,” Saturday Evening Post, April 28, 1962, 34-38; and
“Playmate Holiday House Party,” Playboy, Dec. 1961, 120-129, 209.

48. HH memo to Jack Kessie titled “Playboy Key Club,” July 28, 1959, HP, and Vic
Lownes, Lynch/Frost interview, April 13, 1991.

49. HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, April 19, 1989; and Vic Lownes
interview with Murray Fisher, March 12, 1989.

50. Arnold Morton interview with Hal Higdon, 1967; Arnold Morton interview with
Leo Janos, 1986; and Arnold Morton interview with Murray Fisher, Oct. 20,
1989.

51. See materials on the Chicago Club in HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray
Fisher, April 19, 1989; HS, Vol. 64; and “The Playboy Club,” Playboy, Aug. 1960,
40-44. Abundant materials on VIP are in HS, Vols. 102-104.

52. “The Playboy Club”; HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, April 19,
1989; and Vic Lownes, Lynch/Frost interview, April 13, 1991.

53. HH, “The Hugh Hefner Story,” Sept. 12, 1995, 23; Keith Hefner interview, April
19, 1991, HP; and Will Jones, “Hefners a Playboy and a Workhorse: In Chicago a
Bit of Rome,” Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, Feb. 26, 1961.

. Keith Hefner interview, April 19, 1991, and “The Playboy Club,” 41.

. “Advertising: Playboy Maps New Magazine,” New York Times, Feb. 10, 1961, and
Will Jones, “Hefner’s a Playboy — and a Workhorse: In Chicago a Bit of Rome,”
Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, Feb. 26, 1961. Material on the brief history of

NOTES TO PAGES 163-174

471

the magazine appears in HS, Vols. 68-71. Critical reactions can be sampled in
Newsweek, Aug. 28, 1961, 72; Time, Aug. 28, 1961, 39; and Saturday Review, Sept. 9,
1961, 79.

56. “Playbill,” Playboy, Nov. 1961, 3, and Variety, Jan. 11, 1962. Much material on the
film project can be found in HS, Vol. 68.

57. Tony Curtis interview, June 6, 1991, HP, and “1960-61 Chronology of the Tony
Curtis Movie” and “Chronology of Tony Curtis Movie for 1962 and 1963,” HP.

58. HH to Tony Curtis, Jan. 10, 1961, HP.

59. See documents and letters in “1960-61 Chronology of the Tony Curtis Movie” and
“Chronology of Tony Curtis Movie for 1962 and 1963,” HP; Norman Lear interview
with Murray Fisher, April 8, 1991; and HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray
Fisher, May 28. 1990

60. HH, year-end letter dated Dec. 1961, HS, Vol. 70.

CHAPTER 9. THE PHILOSOPHER KING

1. The Most, Inter Video Production, produced by Richard Ballentine, directed by
Gordon Sheppard, 1961, HP.

2. “Prince of Playmates,” Newsweek, Sept. 2, 1963.

3. “The Boss of Taste City,” Time, March 24, 1961, 55-56, and Bill Davidson, “Czar
of the Bunny Empire,” Saturday Evening Post, April 1962, 34—38.

4. “World of Playboy: Magazine, Key Clubs Thrive on Formula of Sex, Sophis-
tication,” Wall Street Journal, March 22, 1962; New Yorker, Feb. 17, 1962;
“Playboy’s No. 1 Playboy,” Pageant, July 1961; and “An Impolite Interview with
Hugh Hefner,” Realist, May 1961. For copies of the international articles, see
HS, Vol. 68.

5. Art Buchwald, “Tomorrow the World!” New York Herald Tribune, March 8, 1962;
Mad, March 1960, in HS, Vol. 66; and 1962 number of Aardvark: The Intercol-
legiate Magazine of Satire 6- Parody, in HS, Vol. 68.

6. See the following transcripts and/or videotapes in HP: Project ’62: Playboy of the
Modem World, Canadian Broadcasting Company; Keyhole and Today from 1961;
Irv Kupcinet’s At Random CBS television talk show, July 3, 1962; Mike Wallace’s
PM East, August 18, 1961; and The Steve Allen Show, Nov. 6, 1963, noted in
HS, Vol. 92. Many clippings about radio and television publicity appear in HS,
Vols. 90-92.

7. P. T. Barnum, Stmggles and Triumphs (New York, 1981 [1869]), 120.

8. HH on Irv Kupcinet’s At Random CBS television talk show, July 3, 1962, HP. For
typical HH statements of the Playboy ethos, see his comments in Hal Higdon,
“Playboying Around the Clock with Hugh Hefner,” Climax, Feb. 1962, 17, and
Robin Douglas-Home, “Bosom Friends,” Queen, Apr. 24, 1962, 50-51.

9. HH, quoted in Douglas-Home, “Bosom Friends,” 51, and on Kupcinet, At Random
television show. A typical HH explication of his sexual views came in Hal Higdon,
“Playboying Around the Clock with Hugh Hefner,” 17.

10. HH, quoted in Hal Higdon, “Playboying Around the Clock with Hugh Hefner,”
Climax, Feb. 1962, 12, 17-18; “World of Playboy,” Wall Street Journal, March 22,
1962; and The Most, award-winning 28-minute documentary film, 1962.

11. Russell Kirk, “Bunny Ears Are Symptoms of a Sick Society,” San Francisco News
Call Rulletin, July 9, 1963; John Ciardi, “Reflections of a Square,” Saturday Review,
Nov. 2, 1963, 56; and Benjamin DeMott, “The Anatomy of ‘Playboy,’” Commen-
tary, Aug. 1962, 113.

12. HH, “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Dec. 1962, 73, and HH to Milbum P.
Akers of the Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 23, 1963, HP.

13. HH to Milbum P. Akers of the Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 23, 1963, HP.

472

NOTES TO PAGES 175-182

14. HH to Milbum P. Akers of the Chicago Sun-Times , Sept. 23, 1963, HP, and HH
memos to A. C. Spectorsky titled “Philosophy Research,” dated Nov. 4, 1963, April
17, 1963, Jan. 25, 1963, March 19, and April 12, 1963. A substantial number of such
memos can be found in HP.

15. Nat Lehrman interview with Trikilis Productions, 1-2; and Nat Lehrman, “Notes
Toward Hefners Autobiography,” 1991, 2, 4-8; Richard Gehman, “The Fabulous
Hef,” ms., HP.

16. Keith Hefner interview with Murray Fisher, Feb. 22, 1991; “Highlights of Inter-
view with Ray Russell,” June 8, 1989; and Theo Spectorsky interview with Murray
Fisher, May 8, 1989.

17. The Playboy Philosophy appeared in Playboy in twenty-five installments. Following
the opening essay in December 1962, twelve appeared in 1963, six in 1964, five in
1965, and one in 1966.

18. “ The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, installment seven, June 1963; installment ten,
Sept. 1963; installment two, Jan. 1963; and “Mort Salil on the Philosophy,” Mort
Salil file, HP.

19. See letters in “Dear Playboy,” Playboy, June 1963, 12-13; “Dear Playboy,” Playboy,
March 1963; and “Playboy Forum,” Playboy, Sept. 1963, 66, 77.

20. Paul F. Hoye, “An Open Letter to Mr. Hefner on Philosophy,” Providence Evening
Bulletin, Feb. 16, 1963; Robert A. Wilson, “Negative Thinking,” Realist, June 1963,
25; and Gary Gerlach, “This Runny Rusiness — Playboy or ‘Payboy’?” Iowa City
Iowan, Apr. 25, 1963.

21. “Playboy,” Notre Dame Scholastic, Mar. 8, 1963; “Statement Good, Source Ques-
tionable,” Portland (OR) Reporter, MaylO, 1963; “Playboy Ethic Assailed as Infan-
tile by Priest,” New Haven Journal-Courier, Feb. 12, 1964; and J. A. Ward, “Hugh
M. Hefner: Guardian of the Faith,” Antioch Review (Summer 1963), 215.

22. Harvey Meyerson, “The Playboy Philosophy: Bunnies in a Tinseled Thinksville,”
Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, April 21, 1963.

23. Gary Gerlach, “This Bunny Business — Playboy or ‘Payboy’?” Iowa City Iowan,
Apr. 25, 1963; Esquire, Jan. 1964; and “An Infinite Number of Monkeys,” Christian
Century, Aug. 28, 1963.

24. HH to Jack Kessie, memo on “Philosophy Letters,” April 24, 1963, HP, and “Play-
boy Forum,” Playboy, July 1963, 41. HS, Vol. 110, contains a list of Hefners 1965
campus engagements, along with participating panelists, several local newspaper
accounts of the proceedings, and a list of the dozens of campus invitations from
all around the country that he was unable to accept. On the Playboy Foundation,
see James R. Petersen, The Century of Sex (New York, 1999), 297-298, and HH to
author, Nov. 9, 2007.

25. See the following installments of the “Playboy Philosophy” in Playboy. Dec. 1962;
Dec. 1964; Jan. 1965; Feb. 1965; and May 1965.

26. “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, March 1963.

27. “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Jan. 1963, 52.

28. “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Sept. 1963, Aug. 1963, and July 1963.

29. “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, March 1963, July 1963, April 1963, Jan. 1964,
and Feb. 1964.

30. “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, Dec. 1963 and Jan. 1965.

31. “The Playboy Philosophy,” Plaijboy, March 1963, 58.

32. HH, quoted in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans (New York, 1970), 55-56. On
the religious ferment of the 1960s, see, for example, George M. Marsden, Religion
and American Culture (Belmont, CA, 2001), 249-271; Leonard Sweet, “The 1960s:
The Crisis of Liberal Christianity and the Public Emergence of Evangelicalism,”

NOTES TO PAGES 183-190

473

in George Marsden, Evangelicalism and Modem America (Grand Rapids, 1984);
and Robert Wutlmow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s
(Rerkeley, 1998).

33. Theodore Peterson, “Playboy and the Preachers,” Columbia Journalism Review,
Spring 1966, 32-35, and J. W. MacGorman, “Playboy Philosophy Exposed,” Baptist
Program, Aug. 1965, 17.

34. J. James Thomas, “The Playboy Ethic,” Dimension, Nov. 4, 1963, 3; J.Claude
Evans, “Playboy Philosophy,” Catholic World, Oct. 1964, 44-45; Evans, “The Play-
boy Philosophy,” 44; and William Hamilton, “Hefners Hasty Pudding,” Motive,
May 1963, 20-21.

35. Allen J. Moore, “Playboy Goes Religious,” Christian Advocate, July 15, 1965, 7,
and Roy Larson, “The Lowdown on the Upbeats,” Motive, April 1960, 40. See also
Darrell L. Guder, “Who Is Man and What Is Love,” Eternity, Oct. 1964, 23.

36. Moore, “Playboy Goes Religious,” 8; Larson, “Lowdown on Upbeats,” 41; Cox,
“Playboys Doctrine of Male,” Christianity and Crisis, April 17, 1961; 58-59; Frank
E. Houser, “Dehumanizing the American Male,” Eternity, Oct. 1964, 28, 30; and
J. Claude Evans, “The Playboy Philosophy” 46.

37. Cox, “Playboys Doctrine of Male,” 57, 59; Guder, “Who Is Man and What Is Love,”
24-25, and Houser, “Dehumanizing the American Male,” 28, 29, 30.

38. “Religion and the Playboy Philosophy,” National Observer, July 19, 1965, 15, and
John Graham, “The Playboy Philosophy” 1964 sermon, HP.

39. “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy Jan. 1965, 169-170; and Moore, “Playboy Goes
Religious,” 7.

40. “The Playboy Philosophy,” Playboy, May 1965, 193.

41. The Reverend William Hamilton, “The Death of God,” Playboy, August 1966, 137,

139; and “The Playboy Panel: Religion and the New Morality,” Playboy, June 1967,
55-78,148-161. '

42. The transcript of Cox and HH at Cornell is reprinted in “Hefner and Cox: Sex —
Myths and Realities,” Motive, Nov. 1965, 7-11. See also Harvey Cox, “Revolt in
the Church,” Playboy, Jan. 1967, 129, 211; and Harvey Cox, “For Christs Sake,”
Playboy, Jan. 1970, 117, 238.

CHAPTER 10. THE HAPPINESS EXPLOSION

1. Tom Wolfe, “Hugh Hefner, Chicago Recluse — King of the Status Drop-Outs,” New
York: The Sunday Herald Tribune Magazine, Nov. 7, 1965, 7-11, 22, 24.

2. Ibid., 22, 24, and Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang (New York, 1968), 9, 14.

3. “An Empire Ruilt on Sex,” Life, Oct. 29, 1965, 68A; Oriana Fallaci, “Hugh Hefner:
‘I Am in the Center of the World,’” Look, Jan. 10, 1967, 55, 56; and “Interview with
Hugh M. Hefner by Malcolm Muggeridge,” 1964, HP.

4. David Farber, The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994), 2.

5. See, for example, Sidney Tillim, “The Fine Art of Acquiring Fine Art,” Playboy,
Jan. 1962; Ronald Jaye, “ The Playboy Town House,” Playboy, May 1962; and “Play-
bill,” Playboy, Sept. 1960, 1.

6. Joseph Wood Krutch, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness,” Playboy,
Dec. 1964; Alfred Kazin, “The Love Cult,” Playboy, Mar. 1962; and Leslie A.
Fiedler, “The Literati of the Four-Letter Word, Playboy, June 1961.

7. “Playbill,” Playboy, Nov. 1960, 3; “The Playboy Panel: Sex and Censorship in Lit-
erature and the Arts,” Playboy, July 1961; “The Playboy Panel: Uses and Abuses
of the New Leisure,” Playboy, Nov. 1965; “The Playboy Panel: “Business Ethics
and Morality,” Playboy, Nov. 1962; and “The Playboy Panel: TV’s Problems and
Prospects,” Playboy, Nov. 1961.

474

NOTES TO PAGES 190-196

8. Dates for these interviews in Playboy were: Davis, Sept. 1962; Wilder, June 1963;
Sinatra, Feb. 1963; Burton, Sept. 1963; Nehru, Oct. 1963; Sartre, May 1965; Hoffa,
Nov. 1963; Schweitzer, Dec. 1963; Dali, July 1964; the Beatles, Feb. 1965.

9. On the growth of the Playboy Clubs, see “Disneyland for Adults,” Playboy, Oct.
1963. On the Lownes departure, see “Gleanings from Conversation with Eldon
Sellers,” Jan. 3, 1989, Eldon Sellers file, HP; Shelley Kasten interview with Murray
Fisher, Jan. 30, 1991, 6; and HH, notation in HS, Vol. 75.

10. See “Corruption Uncorked in New York,” Life, Apr. 5, 1963, and a raft of newspa-
per stories from the New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, and Chicago Sun-
Times in HS, Vols. 80, 82, 86, 104, and 105. HH presented a detailed explanation of
his magazines role in the scandal in “The Playboy Forum,” Playboy, Aug. 1963.

11. HS, Vol. 104; “Hefner Taking Over Palmolive Building,” Chicago American, Apr.
24, 1965; and “The Cosmo Club,” New York Herald Tribune, June 23, 1965.

12. HH s annual progress report dated Nov. 30, 1964, HS, Vol. 105.

13. HH memo to Jack Kessie, May 16, 1960, HP; HH memo to Jack Kessie, Jan. 24,
1963, HP; HH memo to A. C. Spectorsky, 1964; HH memo to A. C. Spectorsky, Art
Paul, and Vince Tajiri, Oct. 28, 1964; and HH, “Sex in Cinema, Parts VI and VIII,”
Aug. 17, 1965.

14. HH memo to A. C. Spectorsky, Jack Kessie, Vince Tajiri, Bev Chamberlain, and
Art Paul, Nov. 6, 1962; HH memo to Art Paul, Beid Austin, and Phil Kaplan on
“Comment on Current Playboy Design,” July 31, 1962; and HH memo to Harvey
Kurtzman, Feb. 22, 1962.

15. HH memo on “Club Atmosphere,” Nov. 12, 1962; HH memo on “Miami-Chicago
Manager,” Nov. 29, 1962; HH memo on “Playboy Book Publishing Schedule,” Feb.
20, 1963; and HH memo on “Increasing Acceptance of Executive Besponsibilities,”
April 8, 1965.

16. HH memo on “Beceptionists,” Nov. 16, 1961; HH memo on “Miscellaneous Mat-
ters at 1340,” March 17, 1961; and HH memo on “Booms at 1340,” Nov. 9, 1962.

17. HH, quoted in Thomas Weyr, Reachingfor Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America
(New York, 1978), 167.

18. See Thomas Weyr, Reachingfor Paradise, 147-155, 169-174, and Nat Lehrman
interview with Lynch/Frost, May 28, 1991.

19. Paul Goodman, “The Deadly Halls of Ivy,” Playboy, Sept. 1964; J. Paul Getty,
“Money and Conformity,” Playboy, Feb. 1961, and “The Homogenized Man,” Play-
boy, Aug. 1964; and Sir Julian Huxley, “The Age of Overbreed,” Plaijboy, Jan. 1965.

20. Terry Southern, “Seeing Is Believing,” Playboy, Jan. 1965; Dan Wakefield, “The
Prodigal Power of Pot,” Playboy, Aug. 1962; and Bichard Carter, “The Pursuit of
Perfection,” Playboy, Sept. 1961.

21. “Opposing Statements on the Role of the Right Wing in America Today,” Playboy,
Jan. 1963, and Marquis Childs, “The Liberal Dilemma,” Playboy, May 1965.

22. Variety clipping in HS, Vol. 63, and Lownes, quoted in Chicago Daily News, Feb.
5, 1960.

23. News clippings and memorabilia in HS, Vols. 65 and 66; HH, “My Card File —
Mid-1959 to Jan. 1961,” Dec. 21, 1987; John Wilcock, “Can a Negro Be a Playboy,” Vil-
lage Voice, Oct. 19, 1961; and HH, Letter to the Editor, Village Voice, Nov. 9, 1961.

24. L. F. Palmer Jr., “Playboy Magazine Job Policy Bared: Playboy Employs the Best Regard-
less of Race,” National Courier, March 3, 1962, and clippings in HS, Vols. 71 and 72.

25. HH, “My Card File— Mid-1959 to Jan. 1961,” Dec. 21, 1987; Dick Gregory
interview with Lynch/Frost, May 21, 1991; and “Hefner Guarantees Miss. Hunt
Reward,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 25, 1964.

26. HH memo to Vince Tajiri and Bev Chamberlain, March 5, 1962. See interviews in Play-
boy on the following dates: Gregory, Aug. 1964; Clay, Oct. 1964; and King, Jan. 1965.

NOTES TO PAGES 196-203

475

27. See “Playboy Interview: Malcolm X,” May 1963, and “Playboy Interview: George
Lincoln Rockwell,” April 1966.

28. Nat Hentoff, “Through the Racial Looking Glass,” Playboy, July 1962, and James
Baldwin, “Words of a Native Son,” Playboy, Dec. 1964.

29. Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York, 1963), 260.

30. Keith Hefner, quoted in Gretclien Edgren, Inside the Playboy Mansion (Santa
Monica, CA, 1998), 27, 40, and in Keith Hefner interview dated April 19, 1991.
Fisher and Hope are quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 46, 29.

31. HH, “Introduction,” Inside the Playboy Mansion, 12.

32. HH, quoted in “Chronology of Sleep and Dexedrine-Induced Wakefulness,” Oct.
11, 1990, and Victor Lownes interview with Murray Fisher, March 12, 1989, HP.

33. HH memo to Victor Lownes, June 24, 1958, HP, and HH memo to Victor Lownes,
Nov. 3, 1958, HP. See other, similar memos to Lownes dated Aug. 20, 1958, and
July 22, 1959.

34. Spectorsky memo to HH on “The Manipulators,” Sept. 25, 1957.

35. Ray Russell to Leo Janos, Jan. 20, 1987, and Richard Rosenzweig, “Other Voices,”
Rosenzweig file.

36. Victor Lownes interview with Murray Fisher, March 12, 1989; “Ray Russell on the
Editorial Meetings,” Ray Russell file, HP; Arlene Bouras interview with Bob Carr,
March 1990; and Richard Rosenzweig, “Other Voices,” Rosenzweig file.

37. See memos from HH to Spectorsky from Oct. 1965 in “Mansion Story” file, and
Spectorsky memo to HH on “Mansion Copy,” Nov. 2, 1965.

38. “Murray Fisher on the Chicago Mansion Story,” HP. The piece appeared as “The
Playboy Mansion,” Playboy, Jan. 1966.

39. “Hefner Arrested on Obscenity Charge,” Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1963; “Two Defi-
nitions of Obscenity,” Time, June 21, 1963; Hugh Hefner, “Freedom of Religion in
Chicago,” Freethinker, Dec. 13, 1963, 394, 398-399; Murray Rosenfeld memoir
in “Mansfield Bust” file, HP; “Franklin, Freud Invoked in Hefner Obscenity Trial,”
Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 22, 1963; “Hefners Attorney Brands Franklin a Playboy of
’76,” Chicago American, Nov. 21, 1963; “Hefner defends Playboy,” Chicago Tribune,
Dec. 6, 1963; “Judge Rules Mistrial in Hefner Case,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 7, 1963;
and Colin McCall, “Playboy and the Catholics,” Freethinker, Dec. 13, 1963, 393-394.

40. HH memo “1961 Scrapbook Memories,” to Larry DuBois, Murray Fisher, and Reg
Potterson, June 15, 1990.

41. HH memo “1961 Scrapbook Memories,” to Larry DuBois, Murray Fisher, and Reg
Potterson, June 15, 1990; Joni Mattis and HH, quoted in Inside the Playboy Man-
sion, 40, 58; and HS, Vol. 96, which is filled with stories about, and nude snapshots
of, Ms. Michele.

42. Inside the Playboy Mansion, 42, and HH memo, June 15, 1990.

43. HH memo, Nov. 14, 1989, and HH memo, June 15, 1990.

44. Maddox, quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 42, and HH memo to Larry DuBois
and Murray Fisher, Oct. 2, 1990.

45. HH, quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 43, and HH memo to Larry DuBois and
Murray Fisher, Oct. 2, 1990.

46. Cynthia Maddox, quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 44, and in “Sex Is Here to
Pay,” Weekend, July 19-25, 1966.

47. Cynthia Maddox, quoted in “Sex Is Here to Pay,”. Weekend, July 19-25, 1966.

48. Cynthia Maddox, quoted in “Sex Is Here to Pay,” Weekend, July 19-25, 1966; HH
and Cynthia Maddox, quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 43-44; and HH memo
“1961 Scrapbook Memories,” to Larry DuBois, Murray Fisher, and Reg Potterson,
June 15, 1990.

49. Mary Warren file, HP, and HH interview with Patrick Anderson, Nov. 2, 1991.

476

NOTES TO PAGES 203-210

50. Richard Rosenzweig interview with the author, Aug. 5, 2005, and Nat Lehrman and
HH, quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 65, 64.

51. Shel Silverstein in 1968 statement, Mary Warren file, HP; Warren, quoted in 1968
statement, Mary Warren file, HP; and HH, quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion,
65.

52. “An Empire Ruilt on Sex,” Life, Oct. 29, 1965, 68-70. Warren’s changing hair color
can be seen in the dozens of snapshots in HS volumes on the period from 1963 to
1968.

53. Sally Realls interview with Murray Fisher, fall 1989; HH, quoted in Oriana Fallaci,
“Hugh Hefner: ‘I Am in the Center of the World,’” Look, Jan. 10, 1967, 57; and HH
memo to Larry DuRois and Murray Fisher, Oct. 23, 1990.

54. HH in 1968 statement, Mary Warren file, HP; Humphreys party noted in HS, Vol.
103; and “An Empire Ruilt on Sex,” 68-70.

55. See photos of Mary Warren, and cards from her to HH, in HS, Vols. 91, 93, 99,
and 114.

56. 1968 statement in Mary Warren file, HP; Warren and HH’s dating activity as
detailed in HS, Vols. 132, 135, 136, 137; Warrens 1968 card in Vol. 138.

CHAPTER 11. MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR

1. See HHIA, Nov. 3, 2005; HH to Larry DuRois and Murray Fisher, Dec. 10, 1990;
and “Swinging London: ‘You Can Walk Across It on the Grass,’” cover story, Time,
April 15, 1966, 30-34.

2. “Anything Goes: The Permissive Society,” Newsweek, Nov. 13, 1967, 74-76.

3. Max Lerner, “The Pleasure Society,” New York Post, Oct. 11, 1967.

4. For the classic treatment of this theme, see Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic 6- Mau-Mauing
the Flak Catchers (New York, 1970).

5. See cover, introductory “Letter from the Publisher,” and “ Think Clean,” pp. 76-82,
all in Time, March 3, 1967.

6. HS 131 and videotape of The Pursuit of Pleasure, NRC News Special, broadcast
May 8, 1967, HP.

7. Dennis Dugan, “Empire Run from a Round Red,” Newsday, Aug. 13, 1968; Play-
boy Progress Report 1968, HP; “Playboy Puts a Glint in the Admen’s Eye,” Business
Week, June 28, 1969, 142-144; “No Playboys Work for Hugh,” Generation: The
Magazine of Young Businessmen, Sept. 1968, 21-24; and “On Passing 5,000,000,”
Barron’s, March 25, 1968, 1.

8. See photographs and articles on the Playboy Ruilding in HS, Vol. 131; Gene Siskel,
“A Rig Runny Joyride,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 19, 1970; Phil Casey, “Airborne
Playboy,” Washington Post, Feb. 8, 1970; “Hugh Hefner’s Jet Rlack Runny in the
Sky,” Look, June 2, 1970; and HS, Vol. 132.

9. See the following erotic articles in Playboy. “The French Fonda,” Aug. 1966; “The
Bunnies of Missouri,” March 1967; and “Brush-On Fashions,” March 1968. On
literature, see the following in Playboy. Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Parisians and the
Germans,” Jan. 1966; Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Courtship,” Sept. 1967; Saul
Bellow, “The Old System,” Jan. 1968; Kurt Vonnegut Jr., “Fortitude,” Sept. 1968;
John Updike, “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying,” Sept. 1969; Graham Greene, “Crook’s
Tour,” Nov. 1969; and Joyce Carol Oates, “Saul Bird Says: Relate, Communicate,”
Oct. 1970.

10. See the following consumer articles in Playboy. “The Sophisticated Planesman,”
March 1966; “Building a Business Wardrobe,” Nov. 1966; and “Playboy’s Guide to a
Continental Holiday,” May 1968. See the following Playboy Interviews: Federico
Fellini, Feb. 1966; Bob Dylan, March 1966; Woody Allen, May 1967; Michelangelo
Antonioni, Nov. 1967; and Stanley Kubrick, Sept. 1968.

NOTES TO PAGES 211-216

All

11. See in Playboy. James Farmer, “Mood Ebony,” Feb. 1966; “Playboy Panel: The
Crisis in Law Enforcement,” March 1966; and Max Lemer, “Red China, the United
States, and the United Nations,” July 1966.

12. See in Playboy. Edward Bentley, “Conscience Versus Conformity,” Jan. 1967; Max
Lemer, “Climate of Violence,” June 1967; and Kenneth Roxroth, “The Fuzz,” July
1967.

13. See Playboy Interviews with: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., May 1966; Fidel Castro, Jan.
1967; and Timothy Leary, Sept. 1966. See also Jacob Brackman, “The Under-
ground Press,” Playboy, Aug. 1967.

14. See the stories in Playboy, Dec. 1967.

15. On the turbulent Democratic Convention in Chicago, see David Farber, Chicago
’68 (Chicago, 1988).

16. On Hefners experiences with the Chicago Democratic Convention and the Chicago
police, see articles in HS, Vols. 139 and 140; Charlotte Curtis, “Guests Flock to
Weeklong Party Given by Playboys Publisher,” New York Times, Aug. 29, 1968;
“Street Violence Invades Playboy Empire,” Chicago American, Aug. 28, 1968; and
Hefners press conference remarks as reprinted in Law and Disorder: The Chicago
Convention and Its Aftermath (New York, 1968), 86.

17. The best treatment of the events surrounding the Democratic Convention is David
Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago, 1988). See two other books by Farber for insightful
treatments of late 1960s America: The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s
(New York, 1994), chaps. 8-10, and his edited collection of essays, The Sixties:
From Memory to History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994).

18. HH, quoted in “Lord of the Bunnies,” San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner, July 10,
1966, and in “The APME Red Book 1967,” An Account of the Annual Conven-
tion of the Associated Press Managing Editors Assn, at Chicago, Oct. 17-20, 1967,
74-75.

19. HH, quoted in the following: Calvin Tompkins, “Mr. Playboy of the Western World,”
Saturday Evening Post, April 23, 1966, 101; “The APME Red Book 1967,” 67;
William Tusher, “Hefner Sees Link Sex Ban with Racial Bias,” Hollywood Reporter,
Dec. 1, 1969, 8; “Phone Dialogue: The American Sex Revolution,” with Dr. Albert
Ellis, Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Spring 1967, 90; and “Why Not
Pornography?” a forum discussion on University of Chicago TV program Round-
table, broadcast Oct. 3, 1969.

20. See HH’s statements in “Mr. Playboy of the Western World,” 101; David Farr, “The
Night the Bishop Dropped In at Sex HQ,” The People, Aug. 17, 1969; and Malcolm
Boyd, My Fellow Americans (New York, 1970), 30-33.

21. HH, quoted in Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 33; HH to Larry DuBois and Murray
Fisher, Dec. 10, 1990. He reaffirmed this political sensibility in HIA, Nov. 3,
2005.

22. See in Playboy: Jack Lind, “The Sexual Freedom League,” Nov. 1966; Richard
Warren Lewis, “The Swingers,” April 1969; “A Swingers Guide to Academe,” Sept.
1968; “ The Playboy Interview: Masters and Johnson,” May 1968; and “ The Playboy
Interview: Dr. Mary Calderone,” April 1970.

23. See in Playboy: Howard Junker, “Theater of the Nude,” Nov. 1968; “Sweet Paula,”
Aug. 1969; and Bruce Williamson, “Oh! Calcutta!” Oct. 1969.

24. See “Playboy Forum,” Playboy, Sept. 1968 and March 1969.

25. See in Playboy: “Hang One On,” Aug. 1968; “Enter the Nonsuit,” May 1970; and
“Back to Campus,” Sept. 1970.

26. See in Playboy: R. E. L. Masters, “Sex, Ecstasy, and Drugs,” Nov. 1967; “Pot:
A Rational Approach,” Oct. 1969; and Playboy Panel on “The Drug Revolution,”
Feb. 1970.

478

NOTES TO PAGES 216-222

27. See in Playboy: Nat Hentoff, “Youth — The Oppressed Majority,” Sept. 1967; “Play-
boy Panel: The Student Revolt,” Sept. 1969; Nat Hentoff, “The War Against
Dissent,” Sept. 1968; David Halberstam, “The Americanization of Vietnam,” Jan.
1970; Geoffrey Norman, “Project Survival,” July 1970; and Harvey Cox, “For
Christs Sake,” Jan. 1970.

28. See in Playboy: Senator Jacob Javits, “Lower the Voting Age,” Feb. 1968; Senator
J. William Fulbright, “A New Order of Priorities,” July 1968; Senator Joseph
D. Tydings, “Americans and the Gun,” March 1969; Senator Frank Church, “The
Global Crunch,” Aug. 1969; Justice William O. Douglas, “An Inquest on Our Lakes
and Rivers,” June 1968; and the Honorable Arthur J. Goldberg, “Our Resieged
Rill of Rights,” Jan. 1970. On King, see HH to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher,
Dec. 10, 1990.

29. See the following Playboy Interviews: William Sloane Coffin, Aug. 1968; Ralph
Nader, Oct. 1968; Jesse Jackson, Nov. 1969; and William Kunstler, Oct. 1970. See also
Michael Horowitz, “Portrait of the Marxist as an Old Trouper,” Playboy, Sept. 1970.

30. In Plaijboy, see: “Turned On,” Playmate Debbie Hooper, Aug. 1969; “Revolution-
ary Discovery,” Playmate Gloria Root, Dec. 1969; and “Tuned-In Dropout,” Elaine
Morton, June 1970.

31. See in Playboy: “Martyrs of Hope: Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy,”
Jan. 1969; “The Decent Society,” Jan. 1969; “Bring Us Together,” Jan. 1970; and
“Playboys Political Preference Chart,” Nov. 1970.

32. On Playboy s strong libertarian bent, see Nat Hentoff interview with Murray
Fisher, Sept. 2, 1989, 3, HP.

33. Lee Winfrey, “Have the Times Outrun the World of Playboy? ” Detroit Free Press,
March 2, 1970, and Morton L. Ross, “Poor Richard and Playboy: Brothers Under
the Flesh,” Colorado Quarterly (Spring 1967), 355-360.

34. Student quoted in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 16, and another quoted
in “Playboy Puts a Glint in the Admens Eye,” Business Week, June 28, 1969, 144.

35. “The Playboy Forum,” Playboy, Nov. 1969.

36. See, for instance, two of J. Paul Getty’s pieces in Plaijboy: “The Educated Execu-
tive,” Sept. 1968, and “Two Paths to the Top,” Dec. 1969. See also in Playboy, Nov.
1970: “West of Eden,” and “Presents Perfect.”

37. HH, quoted in the following: Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 27, 31; “Hugh
Hefners Jet Black Bunny in the Sky,” Look, June 2, 1970; and Wayne Warga, “Hef-
ner Hops Aboard the TV Bandwagon,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 11, 1968.

38. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York, 1978), especially 12-16,
81-83, offers the most powerful rendering of this critique. For other versions, see
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Bise
of Hip Consumerism (Chicago, 1997); David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New
Upper Class and How They Got There (New York, 2001); and Joseph Heath and
Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture
(New York, 2005).

39. HH, quoted in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 32-33; Harvey Cox, “God and
the Hippies,” Playboy, Jan. 1968; and “Leisure in the Seventies,” Playboy, Dec.
1970.

40. HH, quoted in Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 21.

41. HH, quoted in Stephanie Fuller, “Hefner: Old Age and the Playboy Philosophy,”
Chicago Tribune, April 24, 1968; “Hugh Hefner Faces Middle Age,” Time, Feb. 14,
1969, 69-70; and HHIA, Nov. 3, 2005.

42. See Hefner’s comments in “The New Hugh Hefner — An Edwardian Look,”
Midwest: Magazine of the Chicago Sun-Times, May 5, 1968, and in “Hefner: Old
Age and the Playboy Philosophy.”

NOTES TO PAGES 222-231

479

43. HH, quoted in Stephanie Fuller, “Hefner: Old Age and the Playboy Philosophy,”
Chicago Tribune, April 24, 1968; “The New Hugh Hefner — An Edwardian Look,”
Midwest: Magazine of the Chicago Sun-Times, May 5, 1968; and HHIA, Nov. 3,
2005.

44. HH to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, Dec. 10, 1990; HH to Larry DuBois and
Murray Fisher, Jan. 15, 1991; HS, Vols. 138-142; and HHIA, Nov. 3, 2005.

45. HH to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, Dec. 10, 1990.

46. See HH to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, Dec. 10, 1990, 17-18.

47. See HS, Vol. 136.

48. HHIA, Nov. 3, 2005; Bill Cosby interview with Murray Fisher, Aug. 27, 1989; and
HH to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, Dec. 10, 1990. On the Lake Geneva
resort, see HS, Vol. 137, and “Every Man’s Eden,” Institutions: Magazine of the
Service World, Aug. 1968, 85-100.

49. HHIA, Nov. 3, 2005, and HH, quoted in Wayne Warga, “Hefner Hops Aboard TV
Bandwagon,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 11, 1968.

50. HH, quoted in Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 59; HS, Vols. 138-140; and HH, quoted, in
“Playboy Nocturnal Syndi to Air Hefner, Advanced Sex,” Variety, Aug. 1, 1968, 10.

51. HH to DuBois and Fisher, Jan. 15, 1991; Lee Wolfberg, “Other Voices,” HP; HS,
Vol. 139; and HHIA, Nov. 3, 2005.

52. Barbi Benton, “Other Voices,” HP; HH to DuBois and Fisher, Jan 15, 1991; and
HHIA, Nov. 3, 2005.

53. HS, Vol. 139, which contains Klein s map; HH to DuBois and Fisher, Jan 15, 1991;
and Barbi Benton interview with Murray Fisher, Mar. 12, 1991.

54. HS, Vol. 139; Barbi Benton interview with Murray Fisher, Mar. 12, 1991; HH to
DuBois and Fisher, Jan 15, 1991; HHIA, Nov. 3, 2005; and Bill Cosby interview
with Murray Fisher, Aug. 27, 1989.

55. Barbi Benton interview with Murray Fisher, Mar. 12, 1991; HH to DuBois and
Fisher, Jan. 15, 1991; and HHIA, Nov. 3, 2005.

56. HS, Vols. 145, 146, 148, 149; “Hefner Calls Barbara His First Love,” Sacramento
Union, Aug. 8, 1969; “Playboys Playboy Grooms Playmate,” Columbus (OH)
Citizen-Journal, Aug. 8, 1969; and Barbi Benton interview with Murray Fisher,
Mar. 12, 1991.

57. Barbi Benton interview with Murray Fisher, Mar. 12, 1991, 17-18.

58. BB quoted in “Barbi Is a Doll — Hugh Hefners, That Is,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 18,
1970; “Barbi Doll,” Playboy, March 1970; BB quoted in “Barbi Is a Doll — Hugh
Hefners, That Is,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 18, 1970; and Barbi Benton interview with
Murray Fisher, Mar. 12, 1991.

CHAPTER 12. WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

1. “10 at College Strip During Playboy Talk,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 6, 1969.

2. “Playboy Plus Antioch Plus Protest,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 21, 1969, and Gene
Siskel, “Feminist Strikes at Playboy,” Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 15, 1969.

3. On domestic containment, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American
Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988). See also Alice Echols, “Nothing
Distant About It: Womens Liberation and Sixties Badicalism,” in David Farber,
ed., The Sixties: From Menwry to History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 151-152, who
described this same female role as “ultradomesticity.”

4. This situation is discussed in May, Homeward Bound; Buth Bosen, The World Split
Open; and Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women
in the United States (New York, 1982).

5. The Bobs and Shirley cartoon was reprinted in Playboy ; 50 Years, the Cartoons
(San Francisco, 2004), 32.

480

NOTES TO PAGES 231-239

6. HH, quoted in Robin Douglas-Home, “Bosom Friends,” Queen, Apr. 24, 1962, 51;
and HH comments on Irv Kupcinet’s At Random, CBS television show in Chicago,
July 3, 1962.

7. See in Playboy. Shepherd Mead, “Beware of Hasty Marriage,” Sept. 1962, and
“The Playboy Coloring Book,” Jan. 1963.

8. Shepherd Mead, “The Handling of Women in Business,” Playboy, Jan. 1957, 54;
“Give Your Wife the Pink Pedestal” advertisement, offered by “The Tycoon” in
Philadelphia, Playboy, Sept. 1956; and Lownes, quoted in Bill Davidson, “Czar of
the Bunny Empire,” Saturday Evening Post, Apr. 28, 1962, 36.

9. HH, quoted in “About the Nudes in Playboy,” U. S. Camera, April 1962, 69; HH on
Irv Kupcinet’s At Random, CBS television show in Chicago, July 3, 1962; and HH
to Jean Shepherd, June 8, 1961, HP.

10. See in Playboy. Bob Norman [Burt Zollo], “Miss Gold-digger of 1953,” Dec. 1953;
Jules Archer, “The Great Guessing Game,” March 1956; and William Iversen,
“I Only Want a Sweetheart, Not a Buddy,” July 1960.

11. See the following articles by Philip Wylie in Playboy. “The Abdicating Male,” Nov.
1956; “ The Womanization of America,” Sept. 1958; and “ The Career Woman,” Jan.
1963.

12. “The Playboy Panel: The Womanization of America,” Playboy, June 1962.

13. HH, quoted in “Banned Program,” Mademoiselle, Oct. 1963, 113. (This 1958
Susskind television show on “ The Sexual Revolution in America” was killed at the
time because of its frankness, but the transcript was later reprinted in Mademoi-
selle. ); HH in “About the Nudes in Playboy,” 17. S. Camera, April 1962, 68; and
“An Impolite Interview with Hugh Hefner,” Realist, May, 1961, 9-10. See similar
comments from HH in Robin Douglas-Home, “Bosom Friends,” Queen, Apr. 24,
1962, 51, and in HH to Jean Shepherd, June 8, 1961, HP, where he asserted “a
real and crying need for an antidote to the female-dominated, castrated society in
which we live.”

14. HH, quoted in Project ’62: Playboy of the Modem World, 1962, transcript of radio
documentary broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, HP.

15. HH’s statements on Irv Kupcinet, Af Random CBS television talk show, July 3,
1962, HP.

16. Transcript of The Dick Cavett Show No. 1, 1970, HP.

17. Transcript of The Dick Cavett Show No. 2, 1970, HP. See a report on the incident
in “Cavett Gets an Added Lib,” New York Post, May 27, 1970.

18. Gloria Steinem, “A Bunny’s Tale,” Show, May and June 1963. Steinem’s recol-
lections of the project can be found in Carolyn G. Heilbrun, The Education of a
Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (New York, 1995), 104—107. A forerunner of
the Steinem article came in Jane Kramer, “Dreams of a Playboy: Bunnies on the
Rabbit Run,” Village Voice, Nov. 29, 1962, a skeptical, sarcastic report on the train-
ing of bunnies for the about-to-open NYC Playboy Club.

19. Steinem, “A Bunny’s Tale.”

20. Ibid.

21. Kathryn Leigh Scott, The Runny Years: The Surprising Inside Story of the Plaijboy
Clubs, the Women Who Worked as Bunnies, and Where They Are Now (Los
Angeles, 1998), 6, 184, 144, 147.

22. Gloria Steinem, The Beach Book (New York, 1963), and Gloria Steinem to HH, July
7, 1962, HP.

23. Marie Torre, “A Woman Looks at the Girly-Girly Magazines,” Cosmopolitan, May
1963, 42, 43; Diane Lurie, “In Hefnerland, Women Are Status Symbols,” Life, Oct.
29, 1965, 70; and Gregor Roy, “Plato, the Penthouse, and the Girl Who Hesitates,”
Mademoiselle, March 1965, 249.

NOTES TO PAGES 239-247

481

24. Theodore Irwin, “Cosmopolitan Interviews Hugh M. Hefner, Playboys Controver-
sial Editor,” Cosmopolitan, May 1966, 79-80; Oriana Fallaci, “Hugh Hefner: ‘I Am
in the Center of the World,’” Look, Jan. 1967, 56; “The Playboy Philosophy . . .
Hefner Analyzes Women,” San Francisco Examiner, Nov. 15, 1965; and HH inter-
viewed by Dr. Albert Ellis on Sept. 22, 1966, in “The American Sex Revolution,”
Voices, Spring 1967, 94, 95. HH also offered a clear explanation of this argument
in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 35.

25. Marjorie Proops, “At the Court of the Playboy King,” New York Daily Mirror, May
29, 1968; “Hugh Hefner Raps,” Eye, July 1968, 67; and “Playboy Mansion Hopping
with Bunny Prospects,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 9, 1969.

26. See in Playboy : John Clellon Holmes, “The New Girl,” Jan. 1968; “The No-Bra
Look,” Sept. 1970; and Robert Hall, “The Abortion Revolution,” Sept. 1970.

27. “Playboy Forum,” Playboy, April 1970, 60. See “Playboy Forum,” Playboy, April
1968, 61-62, for an earlier statement.

28. “Playboy Attacked by Student Feminists,” Daily Trojan, April 9, 1970; “Women
Seen as ‘House Niggers’ and Victims of Hugh Hefner,” Little Rock Democrat, Nov.
11, 1970; Guy Livingston, “Femme Liberation Group Pickets Hub Playboy to Pro-
test Bunnies,” Variety, April 2, 1970.

29. Gloria Steinem, “What Playboy Doesn’t Know About Women Could Fill a Book,”
McCall’s, Oct. 1970.

30. Susan Braudy, “The Article I Wrote on Women That Playboy Wouldn’t Publish,”
Glamour, May 1971, and Morton Hunt, “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist
Pig!” Playboy, May 1970. The magazine offered additional defense of its position
in the August 1970 issue in “Playboy Forum,” 52, and “Dear Playboy,” 8.

31. “Confrontation at Hefner’s Pad,” Chicago Daily News, April 16, 1970; “Antibunnies
Jeer at Hefner Peace Bash,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1970; “Women Shake
Up Peace Establishment,” Voices, May 1970; and “Playboy’s Gal Bucks Her Boss,”
Chicago Sun-Times, April 16, 1970.

32. HH to A. C. Spectorsky, Jan. 6, 1970, PP. The memo was extracted nearly in its
entirety in “New Feminists Are the ‘Natural Enemy,”’ Voices, May 1970, 1-2.

33. “Women’s Liberation Adherents Go to War with Playboy Again,” Chicago Tribune,
April 24, 1970; “Liberation Sisters Unite to Take the Play out of Playboy,” Chicago
Sun-Times, April 24, 1970; and “Male and Female,” Newsweek, May 18, 1970.

34. “Playboy Interview; Germaine Greer,” Playboy, Jan. 1972; “Playboy Interview;
Betty Friedan,” Playboy, Sept. 1992; and HH, quoted in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow
Americans, 53^54.

35. Oriana Fallaci, “Hugh Hefner; ‘I Am in the Center of the World,”’ Look, Jan. 1967, 57.

36. HH, quoted in “Sex Is Here to Pay,” Weekend, July 19-25, 1966.

37. Fallaci, “Center of the World,” 56-57; “Hugh Hefner Raps,” Eye, July 1968, 67; and
HH, quoted in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 65.

38. Maddox, quoted in “Sex Is Here to Pay”; Fallaci, “Center of the World,” 57; and
HH, quoted in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 61-62.

39. “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 68, 70.

40. See Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from
Commitment (New York, 1983), 50-51, and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
(New York, 1963), especially chapter 1, “The Problem That Has No Name,” and
chapter 12, “Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp.”

41. Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 49, and Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 322-332. On
the culture of self-fulfillment, see T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-
Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-
1930,” in Lears and Richard Wightman Fox, The Culture of Consumption: Critical
Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York, 1983), 3-38.

482

NOTES TO PAGES 247-257

42. On the split between equity and gender feminism, see Christina Hoff Sommers,
Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York, 1994),
22-29, 131-136. On disputes within feminism over lesbianism, see Ruth Rosen,
The World Split Open: How the Modem Women’s Movement Changed America
(New York, 2000), 164-175.

43. Joyce Carol Oates, “Playboy Forum,” Playboy, Jan. 1975, 18.

CHAPTER 13. DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

1. The “world on a string” comment came in HH memo to Larry DuBois, Murray
Fisher, and Patrick Anderson, Dec. 9, 1991, HP.

2. Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society,
and Politics (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 80. Other useful assessments of the 1970s
include David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s, the Decade That Brought You
Modem Life — For Better or Worse (New York, 2000), and Beth Bailey and David
Farber, eds., America in the Seventies (Lawrence, KS, 2004).

3. HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, July 10, 1991, HP.

4. HH memos to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, and Dec. 17, 1991, HP.

5. HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP, and “Barbi File,” HP.

6. Barbi Benton interview with Murray Fisher, Mar. 12, 1991, and HH memo to
DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP.

7. HH memo to DuBois and Fisher, July 10, 1991, HP; HH memo to DuBois, Fisher,
and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP; and Benton quoted in Tom Burke, “Here’s Barbi;
Hugh Hefners Playmate,” Cosmopolitan, Sept. 1973, 67.

8. Carlton Stowers, “Karen Christy: A Visit with Miss December,” Dallas Morning
News Sunday Magazine, Feb. 27, 1972, 5-7, and Karen Christy interview with
Larry DuBois, Feb. 1992.

9. HH memo to DuBois and Fisher, July 10, 1991, HP.

10. HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP, and HH memo to
DuBois and Fisher, July 10, 1991, HP.

11. Karen Christy interview with Larry DuBois, Feb. 1992; HH memo to DuBois
and Fisher, July 10, 1991, HP; and HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson,
Jan. 28, 1992, HP.

12. Karen Christy interview with Larry DuBois, Feb. 1992; and HH memo to DuBois,
Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP.

13. HH memo to Bobbie Arnstein, Sept. 25, 1972, noted in “Karen Christy File,” HP,
and HH quoted in Gretchen Edgren, Inside the Plaijboy Mansion (Santa Monica,
CA, 1998), 132.

14. Karen Christy interview with Larry DuBois, Feb. 1992; HH memo to DuBois,
Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP; and HH memo to DuBois and Fisher,
July 10, 1991, HP.

15. Barbi Benton interview with Murray Fisher, Mar. 12, 1991, and “Adventures in the
Skin Trade,” Time, July 30, 1973, 52.

16. Barbi Benton, quoted in “Hef in Hot Water,” People, Oct. 22, 1973, and in “Barbi,
the Girl of the Golden West,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 7, 1973; “The Blond Who
Stole Hefner from Barbi,” San Francisco Examiner, Oct. 22, 1973; “Surprise —
Karen Is Hefners No. 1 Now,” Chicago Daily News, June 14, 1973; and HH memo
to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP.

17. HH, memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP, and Christy inter-
view with Larry DuBois, Feb. 1992.

18. Christy interview with Larry DuBois, Feb. 1992; and HH memo to DuBois, Fisher,
and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP.

19. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES 258-265

483

20. Barbi Benton interview with Murray Fisher, Mar. 12, 1991; and Barbi Benton,
“Other Voices,” HP.

21. “Federal Drug Probers Zeroing In on Hefner,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 8, 1974;
and “Hollywood Figures Tied to Playboy Drug Probe,” Chicago Sun-Times, Dec.
9, 1974.

22. HH memo to Patrick Anderson, Larry DuBois, and Murray Fisher, Jan. 28, 1992.

23. “Hef s Secretary Faces Drug Case,” Chicago Tribune, March 22, 1974.

24. For Playboy insiders’ conviction that government authorities were out to get
them, see HH interview with Joe Wiesman in “An Embattled King in the Play-
boy Empire,” Washington Post, Jan. 26, 1975, and Arthur Kretchmer, “Other
Voices,” HP.

25. HH memo to Patrick Anderson, March 11, 1992.

26. On the government s belief that “ The illegal trafficking of narcotics permeated the
Playboy organization,” see Douglas P. Roller and Gary S. Shapiro, Chicago Strike
Force, U.S. Government Memo to Edward T. Joyce, Dept, of Justice, Dec. 18,
1974, copy in HP. On Amstein s April suicide attempt, see Larry DuBois, “Remem-
bering Bobbie” ms., 2000, HP.

27. Pat Colander, “The Life and Death of Bobbie Arnstein,” Reader: Chicago’s Free
Weekly, Aug. 15, 1975; Shirley Hillman interview with Larry DuBois, June 6, 1991;
and Barbara Kerr, “Bobbie Amstein” ms., 1978, HP.

28. Colander, “The Life and Death of Bobbie Amstein.”

29. Kerr, “Bobbie Amstein”; “Crash in Indiana Kills an Editor of Playboy Magazine,”
Chicago Sun-Times, August 10, 1963; Shirley Hillman interview with Larry DuBois,
June 6, 1991; and Colander, “The Life and Death of Bobbie Amstein.”

30. Kerr, “Bobbie Arnstein,” and DuBois, “Remembering Bobbie.”

31. Michelle Urry interview with Lynch/Frost, April 25, 1991; Becky Strick interview
with Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, June 19, 1991; Hillman interview with
DuBois.

32. Hillman interview with DuBois; and Bobbie Arnstein, “Memo to New Bunny
Mothers,” undated, HP.

33. Karen Christy interview with Larry DuBois, Feb. 1992; Hillman interview with
DuBois; Strick interview with DuBois and Fisher; and Urry interview with Lynch/
Frost.

34. Christy interview with DuBois, Feb. 1992; Kerr, “Bobbie Amstein”; and DuBois,
“Remembering Bobbie,” which contains the HH quote.

35. Hillman interview with DuBois; Strick interview with DuBois and Fisher; Phyllis
Mahoney to Dick Rozensweig, July 20, 1993, HP; Michelle Urry interview with
Murray Fisher, April 5, 1991; and Urry interview with Lynch/Frost.

36. Hillman interview with DuBois, and Urry interview with Fisher.

37. Bobbie Amstein to John Dante, Dec. 30, 1971, HP, and Bobbie Arnstein to Dick
Rosenzweig, Feb. 13, 1974, HP.

38. Colander, “The Life and Death of Bobbie Arnstein”; Bobbie Amstein to Phyllis
Mahoney, undated, HP; and Kerr, “Bobbie Amstein.”

39. Kerr, “Bobbie Amstein”; Colander, “The Life and Death of Bobbie Arnstein”; and
Strick interview with DuBois and Fisher.

40. “Hef’s Secretary Faces Drug Case,” Chicago Tribune, March 22, 1974; Colander,
“The Life and Death of Bobbie Amstein”; Strick interview with DuBois and
Fisher; Hillman interview with DuBois; and Urry interview with Lynch/Frost.

41. HH memo to Patrick Anderson, March 11, 1992; “Voluntary Statement” given to
DEA by William Noel, June 15, 1974, HP; and Department of Justice Memoran-
dum, Chicago Strike Force to Edward T. Joyce, Deputy Chief of Criminal Division,
Dec. 18, 1974, copy in HP.

484

NOTES TO PAGES 265-271

42. “Playboy Connection Told at Trial,” Chicago Daily News, Oct. 22, 1974; “Dope
Sale to Hefner Aide Told,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 22, 1974; “Hefner Aide Found
Guilty,” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 31, 1974; “Playboy Aide Gets 15 Years,” Chicago
Tribune, Nov. 27, 1974; HH memo to Patrick Anderson, March 11, 1992; and Pat-
rick Anderson, High in America: The True Story Behind NORML and the Politics
of Marijuana (New York, 1981), chap. 8. Anderson’s book relies upon extensive
conversations with Keith Stroup, head of NORML and close friend of, and attorney
for, Bobbie Amstein.

43. “Federal Drug Probers Zeroing In on Hefner”; “Hollywood Figures Tied to Playboy
Drug Probe”; “Playboy Ex-Security Aide Says Drugs Used at Mansion,” Chicago
Tribune, Dec. 9, 1974; “New Quiz by Carey in Playboy Girl Death,” Chicago Daily
News, Dec. 11, 1974; “Call Hefner in Death Quiz,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 12,
1974; and “Playboy Bunny Murdered, Mother Says; Tells of Clues,” Chicago Daily
News, Dec. 12, 1974.

44. “Hefner Called Drug Probe Target,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 8, 1974; “The Play-
boy Connection?” Newsweek, Dec. 23, 1974; Alexander Cockbum, “Who’s After
Hef?” Village Voice, Dec. 23, 1974; and Bob Greene, “Won’t You Come Home,
Hugh Hefner?” Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 17, 1974.

45. “Party Promotes Pot Law Reform,” Santa Monica Outlook, Aug. 3, 1974; “Who’s
After Hef?” Village Voice; “News in Brief,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 24, 1974; and
Richard Rhodes, “A Very Expensive High,” Playboy, Jan. 1975, 131.

46. Hillman interview with DuBois; Urry interview with Lynch/Frost; and Les Marshall
interview with Murray Fisher, Mar. 26, 1991.

47. Hillman interview with DuBois; Colander, “ The Life and Death of Bobbie Amstein”;
DuBois, “Remembering Bobbie”; transcript of Amstein suicide note, addressed to
Keith Stroup, HS 263. See also “Hefner’s Aide Kills Herself,” Los Angeles
Times, Jan. 13, 1975, and “Hefner Aide Found Dead; Blame Drugs,” Chicago
Tribune, Jan. 14, 1975.

48. HH to Anderson, March 11, 1992.

49. “Hugh M. Hefner’s Statement to the Press on January 14, 1975,” transcript, HP.
Stories on the press conference include “Hefner Hits Probers in Suicide,” Chicago
Sun-Times, Jan. 15, 1975; “Hefner Blames Government for Bobbie’s Death,”
Chicago Tribune, Jan. 15, 1975; and “Hefner Blames Witch-Hunt for Suicide,” Los
Angeles Times, Jan. 15, 1975.

50. “Hefner Blast Clouds Playboy Drug Probe,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 19, 1975; “Hef-
ner Sheds the Playboy Image,” Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 16, 1975; “Puzzling Rev-
elations Bared in Arnstein Case,” Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 26, 1975; “An Embattled
King in the Playboy Empire,” Washington Post, Jan. 26, 1975; “The Death of Bob-
bie,” Newsweek, Jan 27, 1975; “Clouds Over Bunnyland,” Time, Jan. 27, 1975; and
William Satire, “Mayday and Playboy,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1975.

51. “U.S. Drug Chief Quits in Scandal,” Chicago Daily News, May 30, 1975; “Hefner
Drug Quiz Dropped by U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 30, 1975; and Samuel K. Skinner
to Hugh Hefner, Jan. 30, 1976, HP. Hefner’s views on the collapse of the case are fully
expressed in HH memo to Anderson, DuBois, and Fisher, April 30, 1992.

52. Anthony J. Lukas, “ The ‘Alternative Lifestyle’ of Playboys and Playmates,” New York
Times, June 11, 1972, and “Can You Bare It?” Forbes, March 1, 1971, 17-21.

53. “Playboy After Hefner,” Dun’s Review, Feb. 1974, 46; “Big Problems for Playboy’s
Empire,” Business Week, April 13, 1974; and Bryce Nelson, “Playboy Faces Naked
Truth on Revenues,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1975.

54. “The World of Hef: Playboy Rabbit Seen Biting Off Too Much; Critics Say Empire
is a ‘Managerial Muddle,”’ Wall Street Journal, March 2, 1971, and “Playboy After
Hefner,” Dun’s Review, Feb. 1974, 45, 47. See also “Woes of Playboy Empire

NOTES TO PAGES 271-281

485

Continuing to Mount,” Advertising Age, Jan. 20, 1975, and “Trouble in Bunnyland,”
Newsweek, Sept. 2, 1974.

55. HH, “Notes on Captains Paradise,” HP; “Playboy After Hefner,” Dun’s Review,
Feb. 1974, 45-46, 49; Robert Gutwillig, memo to Bob Preuss, April 30, 1974, HP;
Robert Gutwillig, “Other Voices,” HP; “Playboy Enterprises Realigns,” Chicago
Sun-Times, Feb. 26, 1975; and “Playboy Shuffle; Exec Re-Align, Office of the
President Formed,” Variety, Feb. 26, 1975.

CHAPTER 14. DISNEYLAND FOR ADULTS

1. Many of the stories and O’Connors memo are reproduced in Gretchen Edgren,
Inside the Playboy Mansion (Santa Monica, CA, 1998), 122-123, while the poster
was noted in Bob Greene, “A Week at Hef s,” Midwest: The Chicago Sun-Times
Magazine, Nov. 25, 1973. See also Robert Greenfield, “The Rolling Stones Go
South,” Rolling Stone, Aug. 3, 1972.

2. HH, quoted in “Q & A Hugh Hefner,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 27, 1970.

3. HH memo to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, July 10, 1991.

4. Ibid.

5. HH memo to Patrick Anderson, Larry DuBois, and Murray Fisher, Jan. 28, 1992.

6. Ron Dirsmith interview with Bob Carr, March 1990, and HH memo to Larry
DuBois and Murray Fisher, July 10, 1991.

7. “Hefner Housewarming a Benefit for ACLU,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 23, 1971,
Harvey Markowitz to Dick Rosenzweig, “Notes and Comments on a Meeting with
Attorney Jerome Mayo,” Sept. 28, 1972, and Jerome J. Mayo to Judge John B. Milliken,
Nov. 14, 1972, both in HP.

8. Ron Dirsmith interview with Bob Carr, March 1990.

9. James Bacon, “Just a Little Mansion in the Hills,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
Nov. 23, 1971; Anthony Haden-Guest, “The Pubic Hair Papers and Hugh Hefner,”
Rolling Stone, Dec. 20, 1973, 64; and HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson,
Jan. 28, 1992, HP.

10. HH, quoted in Pax Quigley, “Playboy Mansion: Architectural and Other Delights,”
Beverly Hills, Sept. -Oct. 1978, and in Haden-Guest, “The Pubic Hair Papers and
Hugh Hefner,” 66.

11. HH, quotedin “Chicagoland Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Chicagoland, Dec. 1978,
24. See also “Playboy Mansion West,” Playboy, Jan. 1975.

12. HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, HP; Kenneth Turan,
“Foldout Fantasy: Playmates Galore on Playboys 25th Year, Washington Post, Sept.
10, 1979; HS, Vol. 362; and Edgren, Inside the Playboy Mansion, 168, 244.

13. HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992; HS, Vol. 362; and HS,
Vol. 372.

14. Inside the Playboy Mansion, 186-189, 231-234; The Playboy Roller Disco and
Pajama Party advertisement, Hollywood Reporter, Nov. 23, 1979; and Tom
Shales, “Cashing In on the Beatles and Yawning Through Hefner’s Pajama Party,”
Washington Post, Nov. 23, 1979.

15. “Mansion Parties” memo; “Playboy Bunnies Missing at Brown’s Fund-Raiser,” New
York Times, May 24, 1976; “Some Find Splendor in the Grass,” Los Angeles Herald
Examiner, Aug. 4, 1977; and “Playboy Contributes Food, Funds for ERA,” Chicago
Tribune, Mar. 13, 1978.

16. “Playboy’s Playmate House Party,” Playboy, Dec. 1977.

17. HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, and HH to David
Wolper, Sept. 12, 1995, HP.

18. HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992; Inside the Playboy
Mansion, 157; “Mike Trikilis File,” HP.

486

NOTES TO PAGES 281-289

19. Lee Wolfberg interview with Murray Fisher and Larry DuBois, May 1989; HH
memo to Patrick Anderson, and Murray Fisher, Oct. 13, 1992; and HH memo to
DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992.

20. HH memo to Patrick Anderson and Murray Fisher, Oct. 13, 1992.

21. Debra Svensk, “Other Voices,” and Marcy Hanson, “Other Voices,” HP.

22. Monique St. Pierre interview with Lynch/Frost, May 21, 1991, and with Murray
Fisher, June 1, 1992.

23. Leann Moen interview with Murray Fisher, Sept. 4, 1994; Debra Svensk, “Other
Voices”; Marcy Hanson, “Other Voices”; and Alison Reynolds interview with Mur-
ray Fisher, May 15, 1992.

24. See HS volumes 286-447 for Hefners massive photographic and textual record of
many of these sexual relationships. See also HH memo to Patrick Anderson and
Murray Fisher, Oct. 13, 1992.

25. Sondra Theodore, “Other Voices”; Theodores interview in “From Miss Bicenten-
nial to Playmate,” Fontana (CA) Herald-News, June 25, 1977, and “She Went from
Girl-Next-Door to Centerfold,” San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, June 18, 1977.

26. Theodore, “Other Voices”; Sondra Theodore, undated interview, HP; Theodore
interview in “From Miss Bicentennial to Playmate”; and HH memo to Patrick
Anderson and Murray Fisher, Oct. 13, 1992.

27. HH memo to Patrick Anderson and Murray Fisher, Oct. 13, 1992, and HHIA,
August 9, 2006.

28. Theodore interview in “From Miss Bicentennial to Playmate”; Theodore quoted in “She
Went from Girl-Next-Door to Centerfold”; and Theodore, undated interview, HP.

29. Sondra Theodore, undated interview, HP; Leann Moen interview with Murray
Fisher, Sept. 4, 1994; and Inside the Playboy Mansion, 198-199.

30. Leann Moen interview with Murray Fisher, Sept. 4, 1994; Heather Waite interview
with Murray Fisher, May 12, 1992; Alison Reynolds interview with Murray Fisher,
May 15, 1992; and Sondra Theodore, undated interview, HP.

31. Monique St. Pierre interview with Murray Fisher, June 1, 1992, and Marcy Hanson,
“Other Voices,” HP.

32. “Benwa File,” HP, and Inside the Playboy Mansion, 178.

33. HH, quoted in Jack Mabley, “Hef Glories in the Flesh,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 20,
1978, and HH to Patrick Anderson and Murray Fisher, April 16, 1992.

34. Haden-Guest, “Pubic Hair Papers,” 64; HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Ander-
son, Jan. 28, 1992; HHIA, August 9, 2006; and Sondra Theodore, undated inter-
view, HP.

35. HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, and HHIA, Aug. 9,
2006.

36. HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992, and Billy Eisenberg,
“Other Voices,” HP.

37. HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992; Billy Eisenberg, “Other
Voices,” HP; and Larry DuBois, “Other Voices,” HP.

38. “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 78; Sondra Theodore,
undated interview; and Billy Eisenberg, “Other Voices,” HP.

39. Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, Aug.
23, 1976, 26-10.

40. The quote is from Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life
in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, 1978), xvi. See also Peter Cle-
cak, America’s Quest for the Ideal Self: Dissent and Fulfillment in the 60s and 70s
(New York, 1983); Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at
the Breaking Point (Boston, 1970); Robert N. Bellah et ah. Habits of the Heart:
Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York, 1985); and Richard

NOTES TO PAGES 290-294

487

Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New
York, 1974).

41. HH, quoted in “25 Years of Playboy,” Toronto Globe and Mail , Dec. 9, 1978;
“Esquire Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Esquire , Dec. 1970, 42; HH, quoted in
Anthony Haden-Guest, “The Pubic Hair Papers and Hugh Hefner,” Rolling Stone,
Dec. 20, 1973, 66; HH, quoted in “Chicagoland Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,”
Chicagoland, Dec. 1978, 15; and “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy,
Jan. 1974, 72, 82.

42. Christie Hefner, John Calloway Program, television station WTTW in Chicago, Jan.
24, 1979, HP, and HH memo to DuBois, Fisher, and Anderson, Jan. 28, 1992.

43. J. Anthony Lukas, “The ‘Alternative Life-Style’ of Playboys and Playmates,”
New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1972, 13, 16; “Playboys Quarter Century,”
Newsweek, Jan. 1, 1979, 68; Bob Greene, “A Week at Fief s,” Midwest: The Chi-
cago Sun-Times Magazine, Nov. 25, 1973, 23; and “Hugh Hefner,” People, Dec. 2,
1974, 6-9.

44. “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 64; “Playboy Mansion
West,” Playboy, Jan. 1975; “Playboys Playmate House Party,” Playboy, Dec. 1977;
and “The World of Playboy,” Plaijboy, Sept. 1978, 9-10.

45. “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 80; “Sun-Times Inter-
view: Hugh Hefner,” Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 21, 1978; Boris Weintraub, “Hugh
Hefner and Playboy — At 25 They’re Still Having Fun,” Washington Star, Jan. 4,
1979; and HH, quoted in “The Youngest Babbit,” Miami Herald, Dec. 26, 1978.

46. Program tape, Saturday Night Live, October 15, 1977, HP; and Don Bogers memo
on “HMH/Saturday Night Live,” Nov. 2, 1977, HP.

47. Playboy: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Issue, Jan. 1979; Inside the Playboy Mansion,
224-233; and HH to author, Nov. 27, 2007.

48. Bob Greene, Spectrum, CBS Radio Network, Dec. 12, 1978; “25 Years of Playboy,”
Eden (NC) News, Dec. 5, 1978; Max Lemer, “Playboy: An American Revolution
of Morality,” New York Post, Jan. 10, 1979; “Playboy at 25: It Shaped a Revolution
That May Have Passed It By,” Crain’s Chicago Business, Dec. 11, 1978; “Playboy’s
Quarter Century,” Newsweek, Jan. 1, 1979, 68; and “Proclamation” from Office of
the Mayor, City of Chicago, Dec. 20, 1978, HS 397.

49. Alton Slagle, “Reality Crashes the Playboy Party,” New York News, Feb. 2, 1975;
“Wretched Excess,” Boulder Camera, Feb. 2, 1975; and Bob Greene, “There It
Goes . . . Myth America,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 30, 1975.

50. M. J. Sobran, “The Sage and Serious Doctrine of Hugh Hefner,” National Review,
Feb. 1, 1974, 134, 136; George Will, “Playboy of the Gatsby World,” Newsday,
March 25, 1975; and George Will, transcript of Assignment America: Hugh Hefner
at 49, WNET, television broadcast May 6, 1975, HP.

51. Rick Soil, “Prince Hef of Playboy Protects Seat of Power,” Chicago Tribune, July
31, 1975; “Sweet Seventeen and Rocking — and Hugh?” Dallas Times Herald, Aug.
7, 1977; Gary Streff, “In My Opinion,” Milwaukee Journal, July 17, 1979; Tom E.
Roy, “The Ledger Balance Sheet,” Ballinger (TX) Ledger, Dec. 4, 1978; Thomas
BeVier, “Playboy’s Empire: Pushing 25,” Detroit Free Press, Oct. 15, 1978; and “Q &
A: Hefner Is Still a Fantasy After All These Years,” Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1976.

52. Anthony Haden-Guest, “ The Pubic Hair Papers and Hugh Hefner,” Rolling Stone,
Dec. 20, 1973, 70; “Trouble in Wonderland,” Dayton Daily News, Feb. 12, 1975;
Tim Patterson, “Playboyism: Consumerism Run Amok,” The Guardian: An Inde-
pendent Radical Newsweekly, Dec. 27, 1978; Ned Comstock, “What Bugs Bunny,”
Barrington (RI) Times, Sept. 9, 1976; and “Does the Middle Class Finance Pomu-
copia?” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 16, 1978.

53. The quip appears in the “Charles McDermid File,” HP.

488

NOTES TO PAGES 298-304

CHAPTER 15. A HUTCH DIVIDED

1. HS, Vol. 193; Richard Todd, “Gathering at Bunnymeade,” Atlantic, Jan. 1972;
and Paul Galloway, “Convening Hugh Hefners Literature 101,” Midwest: Sunday
Magazine of the Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 28, 1971.

2. HH memo to Patrick Anderson, Larry DuBois, and Murray Fisher, Dec. 9, 1991.
The fullest account of the post-Spectorsky editorial transition, and one that was
based on interviews with many of the participants, appears in Thomas Weyr, Reach-
ing for Paradise: The Playboy Vision of America (New York, 1978), 179-193.

3. Arthur Kretchmer, undated interview with Trikilis Productions, HP; “Arthur
Kretchmer: Other Voices,” HP; HH memo to Anderson, DuBois, and Fisher, Dec.
9, 1991; and Charles Leroux, “Mr. Kretchmer’s Wild Ride,” Chicago Tribune, Nov.
15, 2002.

4. Kretchmer, quoted in J. Anthony Lukas, “The ‘Alternative Life-Style’ of Playboys
and Playmates,” New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1972, and Mike Laurence,
quoted in J. Madeleine Nash, “Male Magazines: The Assault on Bunny Heights,”
Chicago Tribune Magazine, Sept. 9, 1973.

5. “Chasing Playboys Golden Bunny,” Business Week, Aug. 9, 1969, and Anthony
Haden-Guest, “The Pubic Hair Papers,” Rolling Stone, Dec. 20, 1973, 60. The full-
est analysis of the Playboy -Penthouse conflict can be found in chap. 3, “The
Pubic Wars,” in Douglas K. Ramsey, The Corporate Warriors: Six Classic Cases in
American Business (New York, 1987).

6. Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley, “An Exclusive Interview with Bob Guccione, Keeper
of the Penthouse,” Screw, Sept. 17, 1973.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.; Robert Guccione, quoted in Anthony Haden-Guest, “ The Pubic Hair Papers,”
Rolling Stone, Dec. 20, 1973, 60; “Playboy Interview; Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy,
Jan. 1974, 84; and Guccione, quoted in Ramsey, Corporate Warriors, 121.

9. HH, quoted in Anthony Haden-Guest, “The Pubic Hair Papers,” 61; HH memo to
Vince Tajiri and Art Paul, June 8, 1970, PA; HH, quoted in “Q & A Hugh Hefner,”
Los Angeles Times, Feb. 27, 1970; and Bryce Nelson, “Playboy Faces Naked Truth
on Revenues,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1975.

10. Ramsey, The Corporate Warriors, 115, 118, 120, 126, 129, 138.

11. “Playboy Will Publish New Magazine, ‘Oui,’ with European Slant,” Wall Street
Journal, March 22, 1972; “Hefners Grandchild,” Time, Aug. 28, 1972; “Son of Play-
boy,” Newsweek, Aug. 28, 1972; “Playboy After Hefner,” Dun’s Review, Feb. 1974,
48—49; and HH memo to Patrick Anderson, Larry DuBois, and Murray Fisher,
Dec. 9, 1991.

12. “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” Time, July 30, 1973, 49, and “ The Skin-Book Boom;
What Have They Done to the Girl Next Door?” Esquire, Nov. 1976. For another
contemporary analysis of these publications, see J. Madeleine Nash, “Male Maga-
zines: The Assault on Bunny Heights,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, Sept. 9, 1973.

13. “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 63, 84; Guccione,
quoted in “Prodigal Son Makes It Big,” Forbes, March 1, 1971, 19; David Shaw,
“Penthouse — A Challenge to Playboy,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 29, 1971; “Hefners
Grandchild,” Time, Aug. 28, 1972; and Kenneth Koyen, “Has Hef s Vision Gone
Dim?” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 26, 1972.

14. “Pomo Chic,” New York Times Magazine, Jan. 21, 1973; chap. 7, “The Joy of Sex,
1970-1979,” in Janies R. Petersen, The Century of Sex (New York, 1999), 321-375;
“The Porno Plague,” Time, April 5, 1976, 58; and Bob Greene, “Beyond the Sexual
Revolution,” Newsweek, Sept. 29, 1975, 13.

15. Morton Hunt, “Sexual Behavior in the 1970s,” Playboy, Oct. 1973. The subse-
quent five installments appeared in November 1973; December 1973; Jan. 1974;

NOTES TO PAGES 304-310

489

February 1974; and March 1974. For an example of the publicity attending the
survey, see “A Sex Poll (1973),” Time , Oct. 1, 1973, 48.

16. HH, quoted in “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” Time, July 30, 1973, 51.

17. “From Flere to Obscenity,” Newsweek, Nov. 17, 1975.

18. See the discussion of Howard Lederer in Ramsey, Corporate Warriors, 136; Arthur
Kretchmer, quoted in Philip K. Dougherty, “Playboy Drawing a Line on Sex,” New
York Times, Oct. 31, 1975; and HH to David Wolper, “The Hugh Hefner Story,”
Sept. 12, 1995, 42.

19. HH, quoted in Ramsey, The Corporate Warriors, 137; “New Format in Offing for
Playboy Magazine,” Gallagher Report, Nov. 1975; Philip K. Dougherty, “Playboy
Drawing a Line on Sex,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1975; “Playboy Opts for Retreat
in Pubic Wars,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 3, 1975; “From Here to Obscenity,” News-
week, Nov. 17, 1975; “Playboy Courting a Family Image,” Washington Post, Sept.
19, 1976; and “Playboys Non-Nude Cover Program,” speech delivered by Ren
Goldberg on July 22, 1976, and reprinted in Impact: The Voice of the Newsstand
Publisher, August 1976.

20. Weyl, Reachingfor Paradise, 289, and Kretchmer, quoted in “ The Editor in Charge
of Overhauling Playboy,” Chicago Daily News, March 20-21, 1976.

21. HH, quoted in “Daily News Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Chicago Daily News,
Nov. 12, 1976, and the following articles in Playboy : “Johnny Carson, Watch Your
Ass: There’s a Revolution Going On,” Nov. 1976; “Pinball . . . and Other Electronic
Indoor Sports,” Dec. 1978; Norman Mailer, “The Fight,” May and June 1975; and
“Playboy Interview: Francis Ford Coppola,” July 1975.

22. See in Playboy: Kathy Lowry, “Me and the Other Girls,” August 1976; Dan
Greenburg, “My Weekend of Flashy Orgasms,” April 1977; “Swingers Scrapbook,”
Dec. 1977; and “The Great Playboy Sex-Aids Road Test,” March 1978.

23. Kretchmer, quoted in Abe Peck, “Playboy: The First 25 Years,” Chicago Sun-Times,
Dec. 20, 1978, and in “Playboy Plans for the’80s,” San Diego Union, Dec. 3, 1978.

24. Alexander Cockbum, “Press Clips,” Village Voice, April 21, 1975; “Hugh Marston
Hefner Says He Is a Very Moral Man,” Faces, Dec. 16, 1975, 22; and “A Conversa-
tion with Hugh Hefner,” Advertising Age, July 21, 1975.

25. Kretchmer, quoted in Peck, “Playboy: The First 25 Years.”

26. “Daily News Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Chicago Daily News, Nov. 12, 1976, and
Andrew Kretchmer quoted in “Publisher’s Page,” Folio: The Magazine for Maga-
zine Management, Oct. 1977, 3. See also HH’s comments in “Playboy: The Empire
at 25,” Detroit News Magazine, March 25, 1979.

27. Kretchmer, quoted in Peck, “Playboy: The First 25 Years;” “Daily News Interview:
Hugh M. Hefner,” Chicago Daily News, Nov. 12, 1976; “Playboy’s Pipeline” and
“Playboy on the Scene,” Playboy, April 1978; and HH, quoted in “Hugh Hefner of
Playboy Enterprises, Inc.,” Madison Avenue, Jan. 1979. See also Kretchmer, quoted
in “From Here to Obscenity,” Newsweek, Nov. 17, 1975.

28. “Lust for Life” ads reproduced in Jack Feuer, “The Playboy Difference,” Marketing
Communications, May/June 1977, 38^0, and in Barbara G. Harrison, “Reimagify-
ing Playboy,” More: The Media Magazine, Nov. 1977, 26-28. For other treatments
of the ad campaign, see “Lusting for More Life: Playboy’s Strategic Change,” Cli-
ent /Media News, Sept. 19, 1977, and “Playboy’s New ‘Lust for Life’ Media Cam-
paign,” Madison Avenue Magazine, June 1977, 26-28.

29. See in Playboy : Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, “All the President’s Men,”
serialized in May and June 1974; Nat Hentoff, “If You Liked T984,’ You’ll Love
1973,” May 1973; Roger Rapoport, “It’s Enough to Make You Sick,” Sept. 1973;
Laurence Gonzales, “You Gotta Believe,” July 1975, and Playboy Editorial, “Some
Tough Questions About Airline Safety,” Sept. 1979; Scott Burns, “America Is Going

490

NOTES TO PAGES 310-314

Broke,” Jan, 1976; Dan E. Moldea, “The Hoffa Wars,” Nov. 1978; and Larry
DuBois and Laurence Gonzales, “The Puppet and the Puppetmasters: Uncovering
the Secret World of Nixon, Hughes, and the CIA,” Sept. 1976.

30. See in Playboy. “Playbill,” Dec. 1972; Richard Rhodes, “A Very Expensive High,”
Jan. 1975; Dan Greenburg, “My First Orgy,” Dec. 1972; and Hunter S. Thompson,
“The Great Shark Hunt,” Dec. 1974. On the New Journalism, see Tom Wolfe, The
New Journalism (New York, 1973), and Marc Weingarten, The Gang That Wouldn’t
Write Straight: Wolfe , Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution (New
York, 2005).

31. A. C. Spectorsky to Nat Lehrman, April 23, 1969, PA; A. C. Spectorsky to Jim
Goode, Arthur Kretchmer, Dec. 3, 1969, PA; HH to Vince Tajiri, Bev Chamberlain,
June 12, 1969, PA; and “A Report on Plans, Projects, Proposals,” by A. C. Spec-
torsky for “ The Executive Committee,” March 30, 1970, PA.

32. “Playbill,” Playboy, Jan. 1971.

33. See in Playboy: Saul Braun, “Nearer, Silent Majority, to Thee,” Feb. 1971; Sen.
Philip Hart, “Swindling and Knavery, Inc.,” August 1972; E. L. Doctorow, “The
Bomb Lives!” March 1974; “Playboy Interview: Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden,”
April 1974; Robert Scheer, “Nelson Rockefeller Takes Care of Everybody,” Oct.
1975; Robert Sherrill, “Injustices of the Rurger Court,” April 1979; and “The
Playboy Enemies List,” Oct. 1977.

34. See in Playboy: Richard Reeves, “Hustling the Youth Vote,” Nov. 1972; Robert
Scheer, “Death of the Salesman,” June 1974; Craig Vetter, “Bring Me the Head
of Timothy Leary,” Sept. 1975; and Jim Harwood, “Saint Jane and the Hollywood
Dragon,” July 1978.

35. See “Playboy Interview: Jimmy Carter,” Plaijboy, Nov. 1976. Robert Scheer’s
account of the interview appeared in his “ The Ruling Class,” New York Times, Oct.
1976, 14 — 15, while his editorial assistant from Playboy, Rarry Golson, offered his
recollection in “When Carter and Playboy Spoke in Plains,” New York Times, Sept.

30. 1976.

36. “The Great Playboy Furor,” Newsweek, Oct. 4, 1976, 70-71; “Carters Comments
on Sex Stir Disparate Reactions of Concern,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 1976;
“Trying to Be One of the Boys,” Time, Oct. 4, 1976, 33-34; George F. Will, “Not
For Everyone’s Coffee Table,” Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 30, 1976; William Saflre,
“Carter in Playboy,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 1976; “Carter on Sin,” Washington
Post, Sept. 21, 1976; Mary McGrory, “A Guided Tour of Carters Soul,” Chicago
Tribune, Sept. 24, 1976; and Max Lemer, “That Playboy Interview,” New York Post,
Sept. 24, 1976. See Richard Cohen, “Carter, Sex, and Much Ado,” Chicago Sun-
Times, Sept. 27, 1976, and Carl T. Rowan, “Carter Vs. the Sanctimonious Ones,”
Chicago Daily News, Oct. 14, 1976, for liberals who supported Carter.

37. Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 22, 1976; Dayton Daily News, Sept. 27, 1976; Ford ad
in Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 23, 1976; “Ford and Carter Forces Dispute GOP Ad
Showing Playboy Cover,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 1976; and “Carter Regrets
Interview in Playboy Wouldn’t Do It Again,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Oct.

24. 1976.

38. “Romance: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” memo from Arthur Kretchmer to
Shel Wax and Barry Golson, Jan. 30, 1979.

39. “The Rousing Return of Romance,” Playboy, Dec. 1978, and cartoon, Playboy, Jan.
1979,207.

40. Tom Wolfe, “ The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York, Aug. 23,
1976, 26-40; HH, quoted in “Hugh Hefner of Playboy Enterprises, Inc.,” Madison
Avenue, Jan. 1979; and HH, quoted in “Chicagoland Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,”
Chicagoland, Dec. 1978, 23.

NOTES TO PAGES 314-320

491

41. See “Lust for Life” ads reproduced in Jack Feuer, “The Playboy Difference,”
Marketing Communications, May/June 1977, 40; in Barbara G. Harrison, “Reima-
gifying Playboy,” More: The Media Magazine, Nov. 1977, 32; and in “Playboys New
‘Lust for Life’ Media Campaign,” Madison Avenue Magazine, June, 1977, 27.

42. “Leisure in the Seventies,” Playboy, Dec. 1970; G. Barry Golson, “I’m OK, You’re
So-So,” Playboy, Jan. 1974; and Robert Shea, “The Inner Game of Sex,” Playboy,
Oct. 1978.

43. See “Playmate of the Month” in Playboy, Aug. 1976 and April 1978.

44. See “The Playboy Report on American Men: A Study of the Values, Attitudes, and
Goals of U.S. Males 18-to-49 Years Old,” conducted for Playboy Enterprises, Inc.
by Louis Harris and Associates, Inc. (1979), HP. A condensed version of the study
appeared as “The Playboy Report on American Men,” Plaijboy, Mar. 1979.

45. Dr. William Simon, quoted on Good Morning America, ABC TV, Jan. 19, 1979, tran-
script, HP; Simon, quoted in “How Important Is Sex?” Houston Post, Jan. 21, 1979;
Christie Hefner, quoted on John Calloway Program, television station WTTW in
Chicago, Jan. 24, 1979, transcript, HP. See also press commentary in Nadhie Brozan,
“A Study of the American Man,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1979; “Playboy Poll Plots
Pursuit of Pleasure,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jan. 17, 1979; and Abe Peck, “New
American Male: Values Center More on Self,” Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 19, 1979.

46. F. C. Klein and J. R. Laing, “Playboy’s Slide: Hotel Losses, Decline in Circulation
Weaken Hugh Hefner’s Empire,” Wall Street Jou rnal, April 13, 1976.

47. “Middle-Aged Rabbit,” Forbes, June 1, 1977; “A Conversation with Hugh Hefner,”
Advertising Age, July 21, 1975; and Dan Stone, quoted in “Business Chronology for
the Derick Daniels Era,” July 8, 1992, HP.

48. HH memo to Anderson, DuBois, and Fisher, April 30, 1992; Wayne Dunham,
“Playboy Exec Aims for Upswing in Profits,” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1975; Larry
Ingrassia, “Hef Gives Up His Jet and His Mansion,” Chicago Sun-Times, July 30,
1975; and John McCarron, “Hefner to Hold the Fort in Playboy Cost-Cutting,”
Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1975.

49. Klein and Laing, “Playboy’s Slide.” See also “Hefner Gives Up His Biggest Bunny,”
Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1976, and “Playboy Gets $7.7 Million Tax Bill,” Chicago
Daily News, July 26, 1976.

50. Don Parker interview with Murray Fisher, undated, HP.

51. Niles Howard, “Playboys President Search Has Deadline of June 30,” Advertising
Age, April 19, 1976, and Parker interview with Fisher.

52. Susan Britton, “New Man at Playboy,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1976, and Diana
McLellan, “Derick J. Daniels: The Prince of Playboy,” Washington Star Portfolio,
Oct. 31, 1976.

53. “An Ailing Playboy Gets a New Manager,” Business Week, Sept. 27, 1976, 58, and
Derick Daniels interview with Larry DuBois, April 21, 1992.

54. “Hefner Turns Reins over to News Executive,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 9, 1976;
“Playboy Names D.J. Daniels President,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 9, 1976; Niles
Howard, “Daniels in the Bunny Den,” Advertising Age, Sept. 27, 1976, 4, 80; and
“Prince of Playboy.”

55. “New Man at Playboy;” Clifford Terry, “He’s Pushing the Bunny Back into the
Black,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, Aug. 12, 1979; and Lew Powell, “From N.C.
Hutch, the Chief Bunny,” Charlotte Observer, April 8, 1979.

56. “ The Prince of Playboy.”

57. Lawrence T. Mahoney, “Knight Errant in the Kingdom of the Hedonists,” Miami
Magazine, Mar. 1977, 28-30, 54—55; Gottlieb, quoted in Russell Miller, Bunny: The
Beal Story of Playboy (New York, 1984), 273; and HH, quoted in Larry DuBois,
memo to Hefner, Anderson, and Fisher, July 8, 1992.

492

NOTES TO PAGES 320-325

58. Clifford Terry, “Derick Daniels: The Man Behind Playboys Financial Turnaround,”
Chicago Tribune Magazine, Aug. 12, 1979; Lew Powell, “From N.C. Hutch,
the Chief Bunny,” Charlotte Observer, Apr. 8, 1979; Bunny, 273; and Nat Lehrman
interview with Murray Fisher, Oct. 16, 1989.

59. Bob Guttwillig interview with Murray Fisher and Larry DuBois, July 22, 1989; Dan
Stone, “Other Voices,” HP; and Victor Lownes, “Other Voices,” HP.

60. “Hefner Turns Reins over to News Exec,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 9, 1976;
HH memo to Victor Lownes, dated Oct. 7. 1976, quoted in DuBois to Hefner,
Anderson, and Fisher, July 8, 1992; and Daniels, quoted in “The Prince of Play-
boy,” “New Man at Playboy,” and “Daniels: The Man Behind Playboys Financial
Turnaround.”

61. Derick Daniels interview with Larry DuBois, April 21, 1992.

62. Niles Howard, “Playboy Building New Empire on Redefined Priorities,” Advertis-
ing Age, May 9, 1977; “Dozens Are Fired in Playboy Shake-Up,” Chicago Sun-
Times, Sept. 10, 1977; “Playboy Fires 70 Employees in Shakeup,” Chicago Daily
News, Sept. 9, 1977; “Pink Slips Save $1,000,000: Playboy,” Advertising Age, Sept.
19, 1977; and “Another Playboy Hutch Cleaning,” Time, Sept. 26, 1977, 64.

63. “Skinning the Rabbit,” Newsweek, Sept. 26, 1977; “The Bunny Battles Back,”
Forbes, June 26, 1978, 38; and N. R. Kleinfeld, “Playboy Settles Down to Work,”
New York Times, Dec. 8, 1978. See also “Middle-Aged Rabbit,” Forbes, June 1,
1977, 48-50.

64. Mike Royko, “Why Hef Is a Real Pill,” Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 22, 1978; Richard
Cohen, “You’re a Genius Today If You Make a Million,” Washington Post, Jan. 2,
1979; and “Playboyism: Consumerism Run Amok,” Guardian, Dec. 27, 1978.

65. David Handler, “Hefner Is His Own Best Putdown,” Milwaukee Journal, Dec. 4,
1978; Arnold Rosenfeld, “Playboy, Now Grown Heavy With Child,” Dayton Daily
News, Dec. 5, 1978; “Inflation May Deflate the Playboy Philosophy,” Pittsburg
(KS) Morning Sun, Dec. 6, 1978; “Cultivating Ostentation,” Bethlehem (PA) Globe-
Times, Dec. 9, 1978; “Lets Hope There’s No 50th,” Red Wing (MN) Republican-
Eagle, Dec. 21, 1978; “Helped to Relieve Insecurity,” Medford (MA) Mercury,
Dec. 22, 1978; “What Hath Hef Wrought?” Greensboro (NC) Record, Dec. 26,
1978; and “Playboy Deserves No Accolades,” Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette,
Dec. 8, 1978.

CHAPTER 16. THE DARK DECADE

1. Cis Rundle interview with Lynch/Frost, May 1, 1991.

2. Ibid., and Lisa Loving, Trikihs interview, undated.

3. Anti -Playboy ad, Chicago Tribune, Oct. 19, 1980, and Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 23,
1980, sponsored by the National Heritage Foundation, and “Playboy Views Protest
as Recurring Nuisance,” Advertising Age, Oct. 27, 1980, 38. See also “The Chicago
Statement: A Response to the Effect of the Playboy Mentality on Our Society,”
published by the Chicago Statement Foundation, 1979, HP.

4. Among many books on the rise of conservatism and the Reagan Revolution, see
Jerome L. Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism
(Berkeley, CA, 1990); Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old
Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (New York, 2001); Paul Gottfried, The Conservative
Moveinent (New York, 1993); Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the
Cold War to the Culture Wars (Lanham, MD, 1997); Lisa McGirr, Suburban War-
riors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ, 2001); and Robert C.
Liebman and Robert Wuthnow, eds., The New Christian Right (New York, 1983).

5. “Play It Again, Phyllis,” Sacramento Bee, April 13, 1978. See HS 286 for Hef-
ner’s defense of Harry Reems during his prosecution for Deep Throat in 1976;

NOTES TO PAGES 326-330

493

Goldstein’s prosecution in Wichita; and Flynt s prosecution in Cincinnati. In Oct.
1976, Playboy ran a sympathetic piece on the Reems case.

6. Ronald Reagan, Announcement of Presidential Candidacy, Nov. 13, 1979, Ronald
Reagan Presidential Library Web site; Howell Raines, “Reagan Racks Evangelicals
in Their Political Activities,” New York Times, Aug. 23, 1980; “Politics from the
Pulpit,” Time, Oct. 13, 1980, 28, 35; and William F. Ruckley, “Sex Omnia Vincit:
With Friends Like This Man, The First Amendment Doesn’t Need Enemies,” Los
Angeles Herald Examiner, Sept. 5, 1980.

7. See Jeffrey Hart, “Americas New ‘Moral Majority,”’ Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
July 24, 1980; “Politics from the Pulpit”; “Reagan Beneficiary of Evangelical Tide,”
Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Oct. 6, 1980; Falwell’s Listen America! quoted
in “50 Years Later, Playboy Still Swinging,” Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 28, 2003;
Falwell, quoted in Johnny Greene, “The Astonishing Wrongs of the New Moral
Right,” Playboy, Jan. 1981, 260; Falwell, quoted in Jeffrey K. Hadden and Charles
E. Swann, Prime Tiine Preachers (Reading, MA, 1981), 167; “We Can ‘Clean Up’
TV in a Year, Predicts Moral Majority’s Falwell,” Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 10, 1981;
and “How the Pom Industry Set Up the Dope Lobby,” Moral Majority Report,
March 16, 1981, 18-20.

8. HH in Malcolm Boyd, My Fellow Americans, 29; HH interview with Philip Walters,
WBBM TV, Nov. 11, 1981; and Christie Hefner, interview on Mike Miller Show,
WXYZ Detroit, Nov. 7, 1980.

9. See in Playboy: Robert Scheer, “The Reagan Question,” Aug. 1980; Johnny Greene,
“The Astonishing Wrongs of the New Moral Right,” Jan. 1981; Peter Ross Range,
“Inside the New Right War Machine,” Aug. 1981. See also Playboy advertisement
attacking the “New Moral Right,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 1990. Other attacks on
the Moral Majority in Playboy included Peter Ross Range, “Illegalizing Abortion,”
June 1981, and Kevin Cook, “Georgia on Our Minds,” Dec. 1981.

10. “Prayboy,” Playboy, Dec. 1981.

11. Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor’s Wife (New York, 1980), 428^29. On the money and
publicity attending this project, see “Caught in the Coils of Sex,” Newsweek, April
28, 1980, 85-86.

12. The biographical sections on HH appear in Thy Neighbors Wife, 20-4 1, 56-73,
367-412, while the generalizations appear on 73, 367-368.

13. See Joan Reck, “A Skin-Deep Peek at Our New Sexual ‘Freedom,’” Chicago Tri-
bune, April 25, 1980; Rarbara Harrison, “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” New Republic,
May 3, 1980; Mordechai Richler, “Bad Vibrations,” New York, April 28, 1980.
Other complaints about the book’s “pontifical solemnity” and tedium can be found
in Anatole Broyard, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, April 30, 1980, and
Kenneth Turan, “Sex With the Proper Stranger,” New West, May 5, 1980, 93-94.
The partisanship quote comes from Turan, “Sex with the Proper Stranger.” The
impoverished quote comes from Richler, “Bad Vibrations.”

14. Harvey Mindess, Los Angeles Times Rook Review, April 2, 1980, and Kenneth
Turan, “Sex With the Proper Stranger,” New West, May 5, 1980, 93-94. See Robert
Coles, “Transforming American Sexuality,” New York Times Book Review, May 4,
1980, for similar criticism.

15. See liberal criticism in “Caught in the Coils of Sex,” Newsweek, April 28, 1980,
85-86; Barbara Harrison, “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” New Republic, May 3, 1980; Ellen
Goodman, “The Unlovable Talese,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 20, 1980; Robert
Coles, “Transforming American Sexuality,” New York Times Book Review, May 4,
1980; and Alexander Cockburn, “Mr. P, Mrs. V, and Mr. T,” New York Review of
Books, May 29, 1980. See conservative criticism in Joan Reck, “A Skin-Deep Peek
at Our New Sexual ‘Freedom,’” Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1980; “Plumbing the

494

NOTES TO PAGES 330-339

Shallows,” Time, April 28, 1980; and Ernest Van Den Haag, “Once More, Without
Feeling,” National Review, Mar. 6, 1981, 225-226. Many of the reviews seemed to
take on a nasty personal edge, as analyzed in Henry Allen, “Thy Neighbors Wife
and Thy Critics’ Knife,” Washington Post, May 7, 1980.

16. Barbara Harrison, “Thy Neighbors Wife,” New Republic, May 3, 1980, and
Alexander Cockburn, “Mr. P, Mrs. V, and Mr. T,” New York Review of Rooks, May
29, 1980.

17. Mordechai Richler, “Bad Vibrations,” New York, April 28, 1980; Robert Coles,
“Transforming American Sexuality,” New York Times Rook Review, May 4, 1980;
and Ellen Goodman, “The Unlovable Talese,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 20, 1980.

18. Mordechai Richler, “Bad Vibrations,” New York, April 28, 1980, and Ernest Van Den
Haag, “Once More, Without Feeling,” National Review, Mar. 6, 1981, 225-226.

19. See John Leonard, “A Reviewers Notebook: Thy Neighbors Wife,” Playboy, May
1980, 56-58, Talese’s reaction in Philip Nobile, “Sexual Politics: L’Affaire Talese,”
New York, April 21, 1980, 42—43, and “Playboy Interview: Gay Talese,” Playboy,
May 1980, 75-116. HH was quoted in Nobile, “Sexual Politics: L’Affaire Talese,”
New York, 42, 44.

20. For details on Dorothy Stratten’s life, see Richard Rhodes, “Dorothy Stratten:
Her Story,” Playboy, May 1981. Perhaps the longest article ever published in the
magazine, it was based on the work of Rhodes, Playboy editors, and the exhaustive
research of John Riley and Laura Bernstein.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., and “Playmate of the Year Slain,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 15, 1980.

29. See Letters to the Editor, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, from John M. Ertle on
Nov. 24, 1980, and George Hughes on Nov. 26, 1980.

30. Teresa Carpenter, “Death of a Playmate,” Village Voice, Nov. 5 and 11, 1980.

31. HH interview with Rona Barrett, KNBC TV Los Angeles, April 8, 1981, transcript,
HP, and “Dorothy Stratten: Her Story,” 248-250.

32. HH’s comment came in HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007.

33. Victor Lownes, “Other Voices,” HP. Also see Lowness account of the incident in
his memoir, The Day the Runny Died (Secaucus, NJ, 1982), 302-305.

. Lownes, The Day the Bunny Died, 61-94.

. Sally Quinn, “Kismet at the Gaming Tables Spells Profit for Victor Lownes,”
Washington Post, July 22, 1977; Daniel Heneghan, “Playboy Licenses Challenged,”
Atlantic City Press, April 11, 1981; and Terri Minsky, “Playboy Could Meet Only
Fraction of Costs If It Loses Profitable Casino Operations,” Wall Street Journal,
Oct. 7, 1981.

36. Henry Hanson, “You Want Gambling? Here’s Gambling,” Chicago, Nov. 1979, 174;
“Kismet at the Gaming Tables”; and Lownes, The Day the Bunny Died, 106-121.

37. Lownes, The Day the Bunny Died, 146-157; “Raid Playboy’s London Casinos,”
London Daily News, Feb. 21, 1981; and “Playboy Says Permits for Its London Casi-
nos Are Being Challenged,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 1981. Russell Miller, Bunny:
The Real Story of Playboy (New York, 1984), 287-315, provides a detailed analysis of
Lowness and Playboy’s escalating problems with its gambling operation in England.

38. Lownes, The Day the Bunny Died, 157-165; HHIA, Jan 9, 2007; and Derick
Daniels interview with Larry DuBois, April 21, 1992.

NOTES TO PAGES 339-344

495

39. “Playboy Boss Is Fired,” London Daily News, April 16, 1981, and Lownes to
Hefner, May 6, 1981, HP.

40. HH to Lownes, June 20, 1981, HP, and “Hefner Feels Badly About Lownes Firing,”
Atlantic City Press, Apr. 29, 1981.

41. “Admiral Will Direct Playboys British Group,” New York Times, July 9, 1981;
“Admiral of the Bunnies,” London Daily Mirror, July 9, 1981; “Playboys Run of
Hard Luck,” Newsweek, Oct. 19, 1981, 64; “Playboy to Sell British Casinos for
$31.4 Million,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 4, 1981; and quote from “Playboy Loses
2 London Casino Licenses,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 6, 1981. See Russell Miller,
Bunny, 315-332, for a detailed analysis of the final collapse of Playboys British
gaming operation.

42. “Playboy Discloses Plan for a Hotel-Casino in Atlantic City, NJ,” Wall Street
Journal, March 7, 1977; “Playboy Settles Down to Work,” New York Times, Dec.
8, 1978; “Playboys Risky Bet on Atlantic City Gambling,” Business Week, March
16, 1981; and “Playboy's Work on Atlantic City Casino Is More Hurdle Race Than
Sprint to Gold,” Wall Street Journal, April 15, 1980.

43. “Playboy Bets More on Casinos,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 8, 1981, and “Playboys
Risky Bet on Atlantic City Gambling,” Business Week, March 16, 1981.

44. “State Pressures Playboy to Shelve 4 Executives,” Atlantic City Bulletin, April 2,
1981; “Playboys Casino Gets Panels OK,” New Jersey Press, April 4, 1981; “Hef
Arrives in Atlantic City Like a Conquering Emperor,” Atlantic City Bulletin, April
29, 1981; and “Playboy Loses 2 London Casino Licenses, Clouding Plan for Atlantic
City Operation,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 6, 1981.

45. See Russell Miller, Bunny, 333-334, for an extensive summary of the Division of
Gaming Enforcement investigative report.

46. HS 551, “The Atlantic City Inquisition”; “Atlantic City Hearings” file, HP; HHIA,
Jan. 9, 2007; and “Since ‘Hefner Is Playboy,’ His Testimony Was Crucial,” Philadel-
phia Inquirer, April 18, 1982.

47. “Atlantic City Hearings” file, HP; “Hefner Testifies at Casino Hearing,” Los Angeles
Times, Jan. 12, 1982; “Hef Didn’t Know Clubs Misbehaved,” Atlantic City Bulletin,
Jan. 12, 1982; “Hefner: I Was Misled about London,” New Jersey Press, Jan. 14,
1982; and “Since ‘Hefner Is Playboy,’ His Testimony Was Crucial,” Philadelphia
Inquirer, April 18, 1982.

48. “New Jersey Agency Objects to Playboy as Casino License,” Wall Street Journal,
March 10, 1982; “Hefner Is Refused Permit for Casino,” New York Times, April 8,
1982; “Hefner Ruled Unfit to Hold Casino License,” Wall Street Journal, April
8, 1982; “Since ‘Hefner Is Playboy,’ His Testimony Was Crucial,” Philadelphia
Inquirer, April 18, 1982; and Flanagan, quoted in Russell Miller, Bunny, 341.

49. Eleanor J. Tracy, “Playboy Takes Another Hit in Atlantic City,” Fortune, Dec. 9,
1985, 95; Russell Miller, Bunny, 341-342; and HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007.

50. Derick Daniels, “Other Voices ”, HP; Shawn Tully, “Playboy Makes the Boss’s
Daughter Boss,” Fortune, Aug. 23, 1982, 114; and “Miss Hefner Is President at
Playboy,” New York Times, April 29, 1982.

51. Jesse Kornbluth, “The Education of Christie Hefner,” Savvy, Mar. 1980, 17-18;
Lally Weymouth, “The Princess of Playboy "New York, June 21, 1982, 37; Daniels,
quoted in “Playboy Enterprises Names Christie Hefner to Post of President,” Wall
Street Journal, April 29, 1982; and Shawn Tully, “Playboy Makes the Boss’s Daugh-
ter Boss,” Fortune, Aug. 23, 1982, 107-108.

52. “Princess of Playboy,” 37, 40, and “Education of Christie Hefner,” 18, 20.

53. Gloria Allred to Christie Hefner, Oct. 13, 1978, HS 380; full-page invitation/adver-
tisement to NARAL fund-raiser in Variety, Oct. 5, 1978, along with NABAL News-
letter, Nov. 1978, both in HS 380; and “Princess of Playboy,” 35, 39.

496

NOTES TO PAGES 345-350

54. “Playboy Selling Two Resort Hotels for $42 Million,” New York Times , Nov. 21,
1981; Shawn Tully, “Playboy Makes the Boss’s Daughter Boss,” Fortune, Aug. 23,
1982, 115; and CH, quoted in “Miss Hefner Is President at Playboy,” New York
Times, April 29, 1982.

55. HH, quoted in “Executives” file, HP; “Playboy Chief Hefner Devotes Little Time
to His Company Now,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 1981; HH interview with Tom
Jarrid and20/20, ABC TV, Feb. 14, 1983, transcript in HP; HH, quoted in “Princess
of Playboy,” 34.

CHAPTER 17. THE PARTY’S OVER

1. “The Party’s Over,” Newsweek, Aug. 4, 1986.

2. Hillary Johnson, “Blows Against the Empire,” Rolling Stone, March 27, 1986, 70,
72, and “‘I Am a Warm and Caring Person’; Hugh Hefner Talks to Martin Amis,”
Observer, Sept. 22, 1985, 12.

3. Cliff Kincaid, “Playboy Hugh Hefner’s Politics of Hedonism,” Conservative Digest,
Aug. 1986, 22, 24; Steve Daley, “Playboy as Relevant Today as a Nehru Jacket,”
Chicago Tribune, May 13, 1986; “Playboy Empire Faces Midlife Crisis,” San Diego
Union, July 5, 1986; and Robert Maynard, “Playboy Has Lost Touch With Sexual
Tastes of 80s,” Virginia Daily News, Aug. 11, 1986.

4. Joseph Nocera, “Man of the Mansion,” New Republic, Oct. 14, 1985, 36-41.

5. By Bella Stumbo in the Los Angeles Times: “Hugh Hefner at 57 — He Wants
Respect,” Dec. 26, 1984; “Hefner the Homebody; The World Comes to Him,” Dec.
27, 1984; and “Hefner on Hefner: Real Guy Is a Very Moral Man,” Dec. 28, 1984.

6. “Playboy Empire Faces Midlife Crisis,” San Diego Union, July 5, 1986; Robert
Maynard, “Playboy Has Lost Touch With Sexual Tastes of 80s,” Virginia Daily
News, Aug. 11, 1986; “Playboy Falls on Hard Times,” Miami Herald, July 13,
1986; “Sex Losing Its Appeal for Playboy,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 25, 1986; “The
Party’s Over,” Newsweek, Aug. 4, 1986, 56; Bob Greene, “Presley, Hefner: Two
Who Molded America,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 20, 1981; Bob Greene, quoted in
“Playboy Empire Faces Midlife Crisis,” San Diego Union, July 5, 1986; and Steve
Daley, “Playboy as Relevant Today as a Nehru Jacket,” Chicago Tribune, May 13,
1986.

7. Bob Greene, quoted in “Playboy Empire Faces Midlife Crisis,” San Diego Union,
July 5, 1986; Martin Amis, ‘“I Am a Warm and Caring Person’: Hugh Hefner Talks
to Martin Amis,” Observer, Sept. 22, 1985, 14; “Playboy Falls on Hard Times,”
Miami Herald, July 13, 1986; “As Men’s Values Shift, Playboy Seeks a Way to Still
Seem Exciting,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 1985; and Lehrman, quoted in “Sex
Losing Its Appeal for Playboy,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 25, 1986.

8. “Killed by Laughter,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, July 5, 1986;
“Bunny Bones,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 5, 1986; and HH, quoted in “Playboy
Bunny Reunion Closes Door to a Key Era,” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 1986.
See similar critiques in Joe Cohen, “Out-of-Date Bunnies’ Last Hops Are Playboy
Clubs’ Closing Act,” Variety, July 2, 1986, and “As Hutches Vanish, Playboy Bun-
nies Share the Memories,” Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1986.

9. Richard E. Smith to Arthur Kretchmer, interoffice correspondence, Aug. 18, 1986,
HP; “Playboy Empire Faces Midlife Crisis,” San Diego Union, July 5, 1986; “The
Cupboard’s Not Yet Bare at Playboy,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 17, 1986; “Playboy
Bunny in a Hole,” New York Daily News, Aug. 19, 1986; and Christie Hefner to
all employees, “Fiscal 1986 Results,” Aug. 15, 1986, HP. On PEI’s record loss, see
also “Playboy Enterprises Suffers Loss of $62 Million in Fiscal Year,” Los Angeles
Times, Aug. 16, 1986; “Playboy Closes Book on Fiscal ’86 with a $62.2 Million
Loss,” Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 16, 1986; “Playboy Posts Loss,” New York Times,

NOTES TO PAGES 350-354

497

Aug. 16, 1986; and “Playboy Losses Mount; Club Shutterings Hurt,” Variety, Aug.
20, 1986.

10. See in Playboy : “Bo,” March 1980; “ The Liberation of a Congressional Wife,” April
1981; “The Women of Washington,” Nov. 1980; and “Marilyn: A Loving Tribute by
Hugh M. Hefner,” Jan. 1987.

11. See in Playboy: Cameron Crowe, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” Sept. 1981;
“Playboy Interview: John Lennon and Yoko Ono,” Jan. 1981; and Bob Woodward,
“The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi,” July 1984.

12. See in Playboy: Kevin Cook, “The Brawning of America,” May 1984; William
Barry Furlong, “The Fitness Myth,” May 1988; “Playmate Linda Mays,” Feb. 1983;
Robert E. Carr, “A Guerrilla Guide to the Computer Revolution,” May 1981; Peter
A. McWilliams, “Where the Joys Are: A User-Friendly Computer Primer,” Nov.
1983; Walter Lowe Jr., “How to Survive in the Video Game Jungle,” March 1982;
Kevin Cooke, Teresa Grosch, James R. Petersen, Anne Beatts, P. J. O’Rourke, and
Bruce Williamson, “The VCR Date,” Sept. 1986; “Playboy Guide to Electronic
Entertainment,” May 1984; and “Love at First Ryte,” May 1983.

13. See in Playboy: Abbie Hoffman and Jonathan Silvers, “An Election Held Hostage,”
Oct. 1988; Hodding Carter III, “Reagan and the Revival of Racism,” Jan. 1986;
Peter Moore, “The Jelly Rean Presidency,” July 1988; Amiri Baraka, “What Makes
Jesse Run,” July 1988; Robert Scheer, “The Men Who Would Be President,” Nov.
1988; and Trey Ellis and David J. Dent, “Campus Racism: A Special Report,” June
1989.

14. Arthur Kretchmer, quoted in “As Men’s Values Shift,” and Henry Marks, quoted in
“ The Graying of Hugh Hefner,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, May 27, 1984.

15. “Playboy Empire Faces Midlife Crisis,” San Diego Union, July 5, 1986; “Playboy
Falls on Hard Times,” Miami Herald, July 13, 1986; George Will, “Playboy Tries
to Adjust to World It Created,” Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 19, 1985; HH interview
with Charlie Rose, CBS News Nightivatch, Oct. 30, 1985, HP; and “The Party’s
Over,” Newsweek, Aug. 4, 1986.

16. “Playboy Falls on Hard Times,” Miami Herald, July 13, 1986; George Will, “Playboy
Tries to Adjust to World It Created”; and Lehrman, quoted in “The Graying of
Hugh Hefner.”

17. “Sex Losing Its Appeal for Playboy,” Los Angeles Times , Aug. 25, 1986; “Playboy Empire
F aces Midlife Crisis,” San Diego Union, July 5, 1986; “F antasy Has Given Way to Real-
ity in Playboy, Hefner Daughter Says,” Southern Illinoisan, May 3, 1978; Jim Shahin,
“Chronicle Interview: Christie Hefner,” Austin Chronicle, Sept. 20, 1985; J. Ellis, G.
Fabrikant, and E. Ames, “Playboy Heiress Remodels Sagging Empire,” Australian
Business, May 29, 1985; and Lisa Gubemick, “Daddy’s Girl,” Us, July 29, 1985.

18. See “The Year of the Yuppie,” Newsweek, Dec. 31, 1984. For other insightful com-
mentary, see Hendrik Hertzberg, “ The Short Happy Life of the American Yuppie,”
in Nicolaus Mills, ed., Culture in an Age of Money: The Legacy of the 1980s in
America (Chicago, 1988), 66-82; and Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartley, The
Yuppie Handbook (New York, 1984).

19. See in Playboy: Michael Korda, “When Business Becomes Blood Sport,” June 1981;
Donald R. Katz, “Ruthless Mothers: Money, Values, and the Gimme Decade,”
Sept. 1981; Andrew Tobias, “Quarterly Reports,” Mar. 1983; Hollis Wayne, “Suc-
cess Story,” Feb. 1986; Laurence Shames, ‘Tikes! Business Superstars!” Aug. 1986;
and essays by Harlan Ellison, and by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, in “The
Sixties: A Reappraisal,” Jan. 1988.

20. See in Playboy: “ Taking Stock of Marina,” March 1983; “Ad Ventures with Robin,”
July 1984; “$ucce$$ $torie$,” August 1984; and “The Women of Wall Street,”
August 1989.

498

NOTES TO PAGES 355-360

21. See in Playboy. “We’ll Take Romance,” Sept. 1980; “Meet the Mrs.,” May 1983;
“Playmate of the Year,” June 1986; “Kathy Goes to Hollywood,” May 1985; and
Love: A Special Playboy Issue, Feb. 1989.

22. See in Playboy: Marcia Froelke Cobum, “The Return of Designing Women,” June
1989; Jo Durden-Smith and Diane DeSimone, “Man and Woman,” Jan. 1982 to
July 1982, quote from Jan. 1982 installment, 287; Cynthia Heimel, “Fact or Best
Seller,” Feb. 1987; Susan Squires, “What Women Talk About When They Talk
About Men,” Feb. 1986; and “Double Take,” Jan. 1986.

23. “Reason Interview; Christie Hefner,” Reason, June 1986, 37, and Christie Hefner,
quoted in Ron Grossman, “This Hef Thinks She Has Men Pegged,” Spokane
Chronicle, Jan. 11, 1986.

24. See in Playboy: Asa Raber, “Men,” April 1982, Aug. 1982, and Nov. 1982, 53; Denis
Boyles, Alan Rose, and Alan Wellikoff, “The Modem Man’s Guide to Life,” Dec.
1987; and Bmce Feirstein, “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche,” May 1982.

25. See in Playboy: “The Age of Sexual Detente,” Oct. 1981; Laurence Shames, “Sex
in the Age of Negotiation,” Nov. 1983; “Sex on Campus 1982,” Oct. 1982; and Steve
Chappie and David Talbot, “Burning Desires: Sex in America,” Part I: “ The World’s
First Safe-Sex Orgy,” April 1989; Part II; “The Right to Party,” May 1989; Part III;
“The Changing of the Feminist Guard,” June 1989; Part IV; “Pom Minds Its Man-
ners,” August 1989.

26. See in Playboy: Craig Vetter, “The Desexing of America,” Dec. 1983; “AIDS
Update; Myths and Realities,” June 1986; Arthur Kretchmer, “Can Sex Survive
AIDS?” Feb. 1986; and David Seeley, “Night Life in the Age of AIDS,” July 1987.

27. “Shannon Tweed” file, HP; “Newfoundland Miss Is Playboy Playmate,” St. John’s
(Newfoundland) Evening Telegram, Oct. 9, 1981; Shannon Tweed, Kiss and Tell
(Beverly Hills, 2006), xiii-xxi, 61-67; and Sondra Theodore, quoted in Inside the
Playboy Mansion, 250.

28. Kiss and Tell, 1-61; “Shannon Tweed” file; and “Newfoundland Miss.”

29. “Newfoundland Miss”; HS 548; Kiss and Tell, 69-71; Shannon Tweed interview
with Jack Cafferty, WNBC TV in NYC, May 13, 1982; Tweed, quoted in “Shannon
Tweed” file; HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007; “That New Bird on Hugh Hefner’s Arm,” People,
Dec. 6, 1982, 113-115; HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007; and Anne Randall Stewart, draft article
titled “Palimony, Smalimony,” HP.

30. HH interview with Scott St. James, KMPC Radio, May 5, 1982; “Palimony, Smali-
mony”; and HH, quoted in “Shannon Tweed” file, HP.

31. “Shannon Tweed” file; Kiss and Tell, 69; “Life After Hef,” Stanveek, July 30-Aug.
6, 1983; “That New Bird on Hugh Hefner's Arm,” People, Dec. 6, 1982, 113-115;
and Tweed, quoted in “Shannon Tweed” file, HP.

32. “Shannon Tweed” file, HP; Byron de Arakel, “Hanging Around with Shannon
Tweed, Falcon Crest’s Confident Belle,” Orange Coast, April 1983; “Life After
Hef,” Starweek, July 30-Aug. 6, 1983; and Tmdy Pacter, “How ‘Skinny’ Shannon
Hit the Big Time,” London Sunday Mirror, May 6, 1984. See also Tweed, quoted
in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 259, and Kiss and Tell, 85-89, on growing tensions
with HH over her work schedule.

33. “Life After Hef,” Starweek, July 30-Aug. 6, 1983; Tweed, quoted in Inside the Play-
boy Mansion, 250; HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007; HS 601 and 602. See Kiss and Tell, 84-85,
74, 90-92, where Tweed gives an account of her disenchantment with mansion life,
her growing cocaine use, and her affair with Peter Weller.

34. HS 610 and 611; “Shannon Tweed” file, HP; Kiss and Tell, 92-94. Tweed would go
on to establish a long-term relationship with rock ‘n’ roller Gene Simmons of Kiss.

35. Marilyn Grabowski, quoted in “Great Palimony Caper,” Playboy, Aug. 1988, 64; HH,
quoted in Hillary Johnson, “Blows Against the Empire,” Rolling Stone, Mar. 27, 1986,

NOTES TO PAGES 361-365

499

147; and “Playboy: The Party’s Over,” Newsweek, Aug. 4, 1986, 56. In HS 616, HH
noted that in early May 1983 “Carrie Lee Carmichael (AKA Carrie Leigh) returns
from Canada. She will change Hef s life — and not for the better.” In HS 617, a note
says that on May 8, 1983, “Carrie Leigh and Lorraine Michaels spent the night with
Hef.” Carrie Leigh declined to be interviewed for this book.

36. “Carrie Leigh: First Lady of the Playboy Mansion,” Playboy, July 1986, 120; Alison
Reynolds, quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 261; “First Person; Carrie Leigh,”
Los Angeles Herald, July 20, 1986; and Leigh and HH, quoted in Bella Strumbo,
“Hefner on Hefner,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 28, 1984. For favorable comments
on Leigh from two other Playmates, see Julie McCullough and Monique St. Pierre,
quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 282, 280.

37. Inside the Playboy Mansion, 280; photos of Leigh on April 27, 1985, in HS 700;
Anne Randall Stewart, “Palimony, Smalimony” article ms.; HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007;
Leigh, quoted in “First Lady of the Playboy Mansion,” 166; and Loving, Grabowski,
and HH, quoted in “The Great Palimony Caper,” 64, 67.

38. Leigh, quoted in Los Angeles Daily Breeze, July 8, 1986; Michael Roche, quoted in
“Besides Multiplying, Bunnies Sometimes Sue,” People, Feb. 29, 1988, 62; “First
Person; Carrie Leigh,” Los Angeles Herald, July 20, 1986; Richard Brooks, “Other
Voices,” HP; “Great Palimony Caper,” 67-68; and Anne and Dick Stewart interview
with Murray Fisher, Dec. 1992.

39. Carrie Leigh to HH, Dec. 26, 1985, HP; Carrie Leigh, note reproduced in HH to
DuBois and Fisher, July 1, 1991, HP; “Barbra Streisand Fundraiser,” People, Sept.
22, 1986; and “Great Palimony Caper,” 68.

40. HH, interview with DuBois and Fisher, 1989; Leigh, quoted in “Carrie Leigh; First
Lady of the Playboy Mansion,” Playboy, July 1986, 166; Mary O’Connor interview
with Murray Fisher, April 22, 1991; and “Great Palimony Caper,” 67. Lisa Loving
interview with Murray Fisher, Jan. 18, 1993, confirmed that Leigh would demand
daily “Dr. Bunny” gifts from HH.

41. HH, quoted in “Hugh Hefner: The Father of the Sexual Revolution Still Thinks He
Knows Best,” Details, April 1993; Anne and Dick Stewart interview with Murray
Fisher, Dec. 1992; Joni Mattis interview with Leo Janos, 1988; Leigh, quoted in
“The Party’s Over,” 56; Julie McCullough and Marilyn Grabowski, quoted in Inside
the Playboy Mansion, 282, 261; Kimberly Conrad Hefner interview with Kevin
Bums in 2000 noted that Leigh made a pass at her when she first arrived at the
mansion; HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007; and HH, quoted in “Besides Multiplying, Bunnies
Sometimes Sue,” People, Feb. 29, 1988, 62.

42. John Dante, “Other Voices,” HP; Cis Rundle, “Other Voices,” HP; Anne and Dick
Stewart, interview with Murray Fisher, Dec. 1992; Richard Brooks interview with
Lynch/Frost, May 1, 1991; Richard Brooks interview with Murray Fisher, July 23,
1989; Keith Hefner, “Other Voices,” HP; Lisa Loving interview with Murray Fisher,
Jan. 18, 1993; Mary O’Connor interview with Murray Fisher, April 18, 1991; Anne
Randall Stewart, “Palimony, Smalimony” article ms., HP; and Leigh, quoted in “The
Party’s Over,” Newsweek, Aug. 4, 1986, 55.

43. HH interview on Larry King Live with guest host Geraldo Rivera, CNN, March 26,
1986; HH, quoted in “The Great Palimony Caper,” 64; and Lisa Loving interview
with Murray Fisher, Jan. 18, 1993.

44. HH interview with DuBois and Fisher, 1989, and Mary O’Connor interview with
Murray Fisher, April 18, 1991.

45. Chuck McCann interview with Geoff Miller, winter 1989, and Julie McCullough,
quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 282.

46. John Dante, “Other Voices,” HP; HH interview with DuBois and Fisher,
1989, with HH’s loss of sexual interest confirmed by Anne and Dick Stewart

500

NOTES TO PAGES 366-372

interview with Murray Fisher, Dec. 1992, and John Dante, “Other Voices,” HP;
HHs notation on the statue-smashing on Sept. 27, 1987, in HS 795 and two guests’
recollection of the episode in Anne and Dick Stewart interview with Murray Fisher,
Dec. 1992; Jessica Hahn quoted at length on the tape caper in Inside the Plaijboy
Mansion , 286, with her story confirmed in “Great Palimony Caper,” 146, and “Pali-
mony, Smalimony” article; and HH notation on Dec. 20, 1987, HS 804.

47. HH notation on Jan. 9, 1988, in HS 805; “Great Palimony Caper,” 148, 68, 64, 146;
and HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007.

48. HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007.

CHAPTER 18. STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

1. “Pornography Commission Appointed,” Washington Times, May 21, 1985, and
“Meese Names Panel to Seek Methods to Control Pornography,” New York Times,
May 21, 1985.

2. Ibid., and Martin Morse Wooster, “Reagans Smutstompers,” Reason, April 1986,
32-33. See also an interview with Hudson: “Q & A: Is New Action Needed on
Pornography?” New York Times, June 23, 1985.

3. Ronald Reagan, quoted in James Petersen and Hugh Hefner, The Century of Sex
(New York, 1999), 409; Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of
the National Association of Evangelicals in Columbus, Ohio, March 6, 1984,” and
“Remarks on Signing the Child Protection Act of 1984, May 21, 1984,” both on
Web site for The Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan: www.reagan.utexas.
edu/archives.com.

4. Donald Wildmon to Yamaha Motor Corporation, June 18, 1982, and subsequent letter
from Yamaha to Hefner, July 14, 1982, informing him of the campaign, both in HP;
“Thunder on the Right: The Growth of Fundamentalism,” Time, Sept. 2, 1985, 55.

5. Judith Reisman’s remarks noted in Martin Morse Wooster, “Reagan’s Smutstompers,”
Reason, April 1986, 28; Philip Shenon, “Projects of a Provoking Sort,” New York
Times, May 23, 1985; Philip Shenon, “Child Abuse and Photos Linked by a
Researcher,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 1986; Howard Kurtz, “$743,371 Later,”’
Washington Post, Sept. 12, 1986; and Judith A. Reisman, “About My Study of ‘Dirty
Pictures,”’ Washington Post, June 18, 1985.

6. See in Playboy: Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, “Holy Terror,” June 1982, and
Larry Rush, “Fat Grants and Sleazy Politics: Reagan’s Pom Paranoia,” Aug. 1984.

7. Robin Morgan, quoted in “Free Speech vs. the Smutbusters,” National Law Journal,
Dec. 22, 1980, 47, and in “The War Against Pornography: Feminists, Free Speech,
and the Law,” Newsweek, March 18, 1985, 60, and Brownmiller quoted in “The
Place of Pornography,” a round-table forum in Harper’s, Nov. 1984, 36. Newsweek s
“The War Against Pornography” provided a clear overview of the feminist antipom
movement, while other useful descriptions appeared in Robert Shea, “Women at
War,” Playboy, Feb. 1980, and Lindsay Van Gelder, “Pornography Goes to Wash-
ington,” Ms., June 1986.

8. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in “The War Against Por-
nography,” 60, 66, and in Sharon Remstein, “Even Feminists Can’t Agree on Sex-
Violence Link,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, May 4, 1988, and Andrea Dworkin,
quoted in “Reagan’s Smutstompers,” 30.

9. See in Playboy : Robert Shea, “Women at War,” Feb. 1980; John Gordon, “Women
Against Sex,” Oct. 1980; Christie Hefner, “By Sex Possessed,” Aug. 1981; and James
Petersen, “Politically Correct Sex,” Oct. 1986.

10. Linda Lovelace, Ordeal: An Autobiography (Secaucus, NJ, 1980), 189-190, 198-201.

11. Liz Smith, News Center Four, 5 O’clock Report, Dec. 18, 1979, Burrelle’s TV
Clips, HP; “Linda Lovelace’s ‘Ordeal’: Beatings, Rape, and Terror,” Philadelphia

NOTES TO PAGES 372-377

501

Sundrnj Bulletin, Feb. 24, 1980; HH, quoted in statement on “ORDEAL, by Linda
Lovelace,” Jan. 29, 1980, HP, and in “Linda Lovelace on her Ordeal,” Newsday,
April 14, 1980; and Gloria Steinem, “Introduction” to Linda Lovelace, Out of Bond-
age (Secaucus, NJ, 1986), 9-10.

12. Walter Goodman, “Battle on Pornography Spurred by New Tactics,” New York
Times, July 3, 1984, and “The War Against Pornography,” Newsweek, March 18,
1985, 58, 66.

13. Carol S. Vance, “The Meese Commission on the Road,” Nation, August 2-9, 1986;
“Porno Panel Given Graphic Testimony,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 18, 1985; Robert
Scheer, “Inside the Meese Commission,” Playboy, Aug. 1986; and “Sex Busters,”
Time, July 21, 1986. The fullest, if highly critical, account of the Meese Commis-
sions endeavors appears in Philip Nobile and Eric Nadler, United States of America
vs. Sex: How the Meese Commission Lied About Pornography (New York, 1986).

14. Burt Joseph, quoted hi “Junk Pornography Panel, Playboy Says,” Chicago Sun-Times,
April 24, 1986; witness quoted in Hendrik Hertzberg, “Big Boobs: Ed Meese and
His Pornography Commission,” New Republic, July 14 and 21, 1986, 22; Transcript,
Miki Garcia Statement to U.S. Attorney Generals Commission on Pornography,
Oct. 17, 1985, HP; “Playboy Says Unsold Book Motive for Centerfold Allegations,”
Associated Press, Oct. 18, 1985; and “Playboy Testifies Before Pornography Com-
mission,” United Press International, Oct. 18, 1985.

15. Burton Joseph, Special Counsel for Playboy, to Alan Sears, Executive Director,
Attorney Generals Commission on Pornography, Nov. 6, 1985, HP, and Miki Garcia
memo to Les Marshall, Sept. 7, 1977, HP.

16. Brenda MacKillop’s testimony quoted in HH, “Sexual McCarthyism,” Playboy, Jan.
1986, 58, and at greater length in Nobile and Nadler, United States of America vs. Sex,
107-108; MacKillop, quoted in “Ex-Bunny: Depravity Starts with Playboy,” Cedar Bap-
ids Gazette, Oct. 25, 1986, and in “Ex-Playboy Bunny Leads Antipomography Rally,”
Washington Post, Aug. 7, 1986; and HH to Brenda MacKillop, July 25, 1986, HP.

17. Form letter sent to companies from Alan E. Sears, Executive Director, Attorney
Generals Commission on Pornography, Feb. 11, 1986, HP; “Chill Factor,” Time,
June 23, 1986, 46; and “Meese Commission on the Road,” 77.

18. “Adult Magazines Lose Sales as 8,000 Stores Forbid Them,” New York Times, June
16, 1986; “7-Elevens Act to Stop Adult Magazine Sales,” Los Angeles Times, April
11, 1986; and Thompson, quoted in “7-11 Won’t Sell Adult Magazines,” Chicago
Tribune, April 11, 1986.

19. Christie Hefner, quoted in “7-lls Act to Stop Adult Magazine Sales,” Los Ange-
les Times, April 11, 1986; “Inside the Meese Commission”; “Pornography Panel
Barred from Publicizing Retailers,” New York Times, July 4, 1986; “Pornography
Case Judge Rebukes Panel,” Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1986; and “The Women of
7-Eleven,” Playboy, Dec. 1986.

20. Robert H. Burger, “The Meese Report on Pornography and Its Respondents,”
Library Quarterly, 1987; Updike and Irving letters included in full in Nobile and
Nadler, United States of America vs. Sex, 194-197; Marcia Pally, “Ban Sexism,
Not Pornography,” Nation, June 29, 1985, which included the ACLU quote; Lisa
Duggan, “The Dubious Porn War Alliance,” Washington Post, Sept. 1, 1985; “The
Higher Morality of Power,” Chicago Tribune, May 2, 1986; and “Bluenosed Bul-
lies,” Orange County Register, April 30, 1986.

21. “The ‘Rev. Ed’ Puts His Foot Down, and Suddenly Playboy Is Hopping Again,”
Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1986.

22. HH, quoted in Sandi Freeman Report, CNN, Dec. 12, 1984, HP, and in interview,
American Focus, KPWR FM radio, April 13, 1986. See a similar expression of
sentiments in HH interview with Charlie Rose, CBS News Nightwatch, Oct. 30,

502

NOTES TO PAGES 377-382

1985, HP, and HH, quoted in “All-American Playboy,” San Antonio Light, April 13,

1986.

23. “Sexual McCarthyism,” 58-59, and Hugh M. Hefner, “The Blacklist,” Playboy, July
1986.

24. Jonathan Roberts, “Hugh Hefner,” Interview, December 1985; HH, quoted on
Larry King Live, CNN, March 26, 1986, HP; “Hugh Hefner: The Father of the
Sexual Revolution Still Thinks He Knows Best,” Details, April 1983, 131; and HH
interview, KCBS News, Dec. 5, 1985. See also HH interview with Charlie Rose,
CRS News Nightwatch, Oct. 30, 1985, HP.

25. “Meese’s Anti-Porn Rattle Plan,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, July 10, 1986;
“Pornography Commission’s Report Calls for Nationwide Crackdown on Obscen-
ity,” Wall Street Journal, July 10, 1986; “Panel Calls on Citizens to Wage National
Assault on Pornography,” New York Times, July 10, 1986; and “A Salvo in the Pom
War,” Newsweek, July 21, 1986.

26. Schauer, quoted in “Big Boobs”; “2 on U.S. Panel Dissent on Pornography’s
Impact,” New York Times, May 19, 1986; “Researchers Dispute Pornography
Report on Link to Violence,” New York Times, May 17, 1986; and “The Pornog-
raphy Panel’s Controversial Last Days,” Washington Post, May 30, 1986. See E. I.
Donnerstein and D. G. Linz, “The Question of Pornography,” Psychology Today,
Dec. 1986, for a fuller airing of complaints about the commission’s misuse of
research findings.

27. Jerry Falwell, quoted in “Report Draws Strong Praise and Criticism,” New York
Times, July 10, 1986; Pat Robertson, quoted in “Sexbusters,” 17; radical feminists
quoted in “A Second Opinion on Pornography’s Impact,” New York Times, May 18,
1986, and “Sexbusters,” 18; and Cal Thomas, “Society Has a Moral Right to Act
Against Pornography,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1986.

28. Liberal dismissals included “Not Smut, Just Trash,” Los Angeles Times, July 10,
1986; Ellen Goodman, “Will the Bunny Killer Also Kill Pornography?” Chicago
Tribune, July 4, 1986; “The Pomo Proposals,” Washington Post, July 11, 1986; “Pom
Commission Report Misses the Larger Points,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 13,
1986; and “The Story of X,” New York Times, July 13, 1986. See “Rig Roobs,” while
Kinsley was quoted in ‘Personalities,” Washington Post, June 28, 1986. See William
F Buckley, “Pomo Panel’s Report Bares Errors, Lacks Solutions,” New York Daily
News, July 14, 1986; “Meese vs. Playboy,” National Review, Aug. 1, 1986, 13-14;
and “Sexbusters” and “The Individual Is Sovereign,” Time, July 21, 1986, 80.

29. Hugh M. Hefner, “Sex and the State,” Playboy, Oct. 1986, 53, and HH on News-
week on the Air, WFYR Radio in Chicago, July 27, 1986, HP.

30. See the following in the New York Times: “Defeated by Pornography,” June 2,
1986; “The Story of X,” July 13, 1986; and Anna Quindlen, “Defining Obscenity;
Not for Blind Justice,” July 23, 1986. For similar pieces opposing the Meese Com-
mission proposals but acknowledging a pornography problem, see “The Pomo
Proposals,” Washington Post, July 11, 1986; “Pom Commission Report Misses the
Larger Point,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 13, 1986; Ellen Goodman, “Will the
Bunny Killer Also Kill Pornography?” Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1986; “An Issue of
Consent,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1986; Jim Courier, “Protect Families From
Pornography,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 16, 1986; and “A Salvo in the Porn War,”
Newsweek, July 21, 1986, 18.

31. “Sex Busters,” Time, July 21, 1986, 13.

32. Peter Bogdanovich, The Killing of the Unicom: Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (New
York, 1984), 9.

33. Ibid., 5, 7, 18,21.

34. Ibid., 29, 32, 174-175, 176, 184.

NOTES TO PAGES 382-386

503

35. “Peter Bogdanovich: Visits to the Mansion” document, HP; HH interview with
Playboy lawyer Paul Ciotti, Nov. 16, 1984, Document No. 11, Dorothy Stratten
File, HP; HHIA, Jan. 9, 2007; and HH, quoted in Paul Ciotti, “Doing Right by
Dorothy,” California, July 1985, 96.

36. HH s statement to Paul Ciotti, Nov. 16, 1984, Document No. 11, Dorothy Stratten
File, HP; Edward Bennett Williams to Harvey L. Lipton, General Counsel for the
Hearst Corporation, June 28, 1984, HP; Today, NBC, Aug. 27, 1984, transcript,
HP; Good Morning America, ABC, Aug. 27, 1984, transcript, HP; Nigfitwatch,
CBS, August 31, 1984, transcript, HP; and George Christian, “Bogdanovich Relates
His Side of Dorothy Stratten’s Story,” Houston Chronicle, Sept. 4, 1984. See also
Peter Bogdanovich interview, The David Newnmn Show, WJR-AM Radio, Detroit,
Nov. 29, 1984, transcript, HP. Unicom was serialized in five installments in the New
York Daily News: Sept. 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6, 1984.

37. Bogdanovich, quoted in Gregg Kilday, “The Bunny Hop, Part II,” Los Angeles
Herald Examiner, April 1, 1985, and in “Doing Right by Dorothy,” 96.

38. “Hefner Responds,” Playboy statement on Unicom, printed in USA Today, Aug.
2, 1984, and “Hefner Counters Bogdanovich View of Stratten Killing,” Chicago
Sun-Times, Aug. 22, 1984. See HH interview with Paul Ciotti, Nov. 16, 1984,
Document No. 11, Dorothy Stratten File, HP, for a private expression of such
sentiments.

39. Lisa Loving interview with Murray Fisher, Jan. 18, 1993, and with Michael Trikilis,
undated, both in HP.

40. Cis Rundle interview with Lynch/Frost, May 1, 1991; Lisa Loving interview with
Murray Fisher, Jan. 18, 1993; Loving quoted in “Doing Right by Dorothy,” 82; and
HH interview with Paul Ciotti, Nov. 16, 1984, Document No. 11, Dorothy Stratten
File, HP.

41. “A Psychiatric Appraisal of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Killing of the Unicom,” Aug.
28, 1984, Document No. 10, Dorothy Stratten File, HP, and “Notes from a Meeting
with Mary O’Connor, Lisa Loving, and Bill Jordan of WCJ Investigative Consul-
tants,” June 29, 1984, HP.

42. Nancy Evans, “How the Playmate Was Murdered,” Glamour, Feb. 1984, and
“Review: Killing of the Unicom,” Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1984. For positive
reviews, see Roxanne T. Mueller, “A Moving Tribute to a Slain Beauty,” Cleveland
Plain Dealer, Aug. 19, 1984, and Darrell Shoults, “The Killing of Dorothy Stratten:
A Story Bogdanovich Has to Tell,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Aug. 18-19, 1984.

43. Lyda Hurst, “Exploitation of Slain Playmate Continues,” Toronto Star, Aug. 23,
1984; Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Stratten Story,” American Film, Nov. 1984, 75;
and Shoults, “Killing of Dorothy Stratten.”

44. Sneed and Lavin, “Hugh Who?” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 5, 1984; Matt Roush,
“Bogdanovich on the Stratten Tragedy,” USA Today, Aug. 2, 1984; James Wolcott,
“The Killing of the Unicom,” Vanity Fair, Aug. 1984, 38; Lee Grant, “Love and
Death, Hollywood Style,” San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 9, 1984; Joseph Nocera,
“Man of the Mansion,” New Republic, Oct. 14, 1985, 38; and Charles Champlin,
“The Killing of the Unicom,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 5, 1984. See Joel E. Siegel,
“A Cracked Pot,” Washington City Paper, Aug. 17-23, 1984, and Eleanor Ringel,
“Stratten Memoir Clouded by Love,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 19, 1984, for other
examples of negative book reviews that nonetheless pilloried Hefner.

45. HS 697 presents a full record of the press conference. HH was quoted in many
newspapers, including “New Charges Fly in Playmate’s Murder,” Boston Herald,
April 2, 1985; “Hef: ‘Film Big Seduced My Playmate’s Teen Sister,’” New York
Post, April 2, 1985; and “Hefner Refutes Bogdanovich’s Accusations Re Stratten
Death,” Variety, April 2, 1985.

504

NOTES TO PAGES 386-396

46. “Actress’ Sister Sues Hefner for $5 Million,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 9, 1985, and
Gregg Kilday, “Page 2: The Bunny Hop, Part III,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
April 9, 1985, with HH quoted in both; Allred and HH, quoted in “Blows Against
the Empire,” 144; Gregg Kilday, “Page Two: Truce or Consequences,” Los Angeles
Herald Examiner, Sept. 4, 1986; “The Region,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 30, 1985;
and “Playboy Enterprises Press Release,” Aug. 29, 1985, HP.

47. Patrick Curtis described in Ciotti, “Doing Right by Dorothy,” 83, and “Rlows
Against the Empire,” 142; Marilyn Grabowski, “Stratten’s Playboy Years,” Los
Angeles Times, Aug. 19, 1984; Dorothy Stratten to HH, April 8, 1979, HP; “Rogda-
novich Weds Stratten’s Sister,” USA Today, Jan. 4, 1989; “Brides Mom Rips Love-
Triangle Director,” New York Post, Jan. 5, 1989; “Bogdanovich Takes Stratten’s
Little Sister as His New Bride,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Jan. 3, 1989; and
HH to author, Nov. 28, 2007.

48. “Playboy Enterprises Press Release,” Aug. 29, 1985; Rarry Koltnow, “Hefner Puts
Stratten s Story in Center Ring — Again,” Santa Ana Register, April 3, 1985; “Blows
Against the Empire,” 72; Gregg Kilday, “Page 2; Surrender Dorothy!” Los Angeles
Herald Examiner, April 2, 1985; Gordon Diller, “Hefner Mystique Lives Only in
Boyhood Dreams,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, April 8, 1985; and HH, quoted in
Hillary Johnson, “Blows Against the Empire,” Rolling Stone, March 27, 1986, 71.

49. Arthur Kretchmer to Hugh Hefner, memo on “Bogdanovich,” July 6, 1984, HP.

50. Ibid.

CHAPTER 19. THE BRIDE WORE CLOTHES

1. HH interview with Charlie Rose, CBS News Nightwatch, Oct. 30, 1985, HP; HHIA,
Apr. 11, 2007; and Lisa Loving interview with Michael Trikilis, undated, HP.

2. Mark Saginor, “Letter to the Editor,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 26, 1985, HP;
Mark Saginor on “Hef’s Stroke,” and Joe Piastre on “Hef’s Stroke,” Gretchen
Edgren, Inside the Playboy Mansion (Santa Monica, CA, 1998), 272-273; Chris-
tie Hefner, quoted in Inside the Playboy Mansion, documentary film (E!, 2002);
HHIA, April 11, 2007; and Leigh’s “Dear John” letter, April 5, 1985, HP.

3. Mary O’Connor interview with Murray Fisher, April 22, 1991; HH interview with
Charlie Rose, CBS News Nightwatch, Oct. 30, 1985, HP; and Murray Fisher, quot-
ing Hefner during his interview with Joni Mattis, Jan. 19, 1990.

4. HH press release, March 20, 1985, HP; HH, quoted in “Hefner Puts Stratten Story
in Center Ring — Again,” Santa Ana Register, April 3, 1985; HH interview with
Charlie Rose, CRS News Nightwatch, Oct. 30, 1985, HP; HH interview, American
Focus, KPWR FM radio, April 13, 1986; and “Def Hef; Hugh Hefner on Feminism,
Fatherhood, and Forty Years of Centerfolds,” Ruzz, Nov./Dec. 1992, 115.

5. HHIA, April 11, 2007.

6. Anne and Dick Stewart interview with Murray Fisher, Dec. 1992, and HHIA,
April 11, 2007.

7. HS 785; HS 786; and Kimberly Conrad Hefner interview with the author. May 30,
2007.

8. Hefner and Conrad, quoted in Jeannine Stein, “Mrs. Hef?” Los Angeles Times,
Oct. 21, 1988; Secretary Lisa Loving’s notebook entry for Jan. 20, in HS 806; and
HS 807.

9. HS 785, and Kimberly Conrad, Hefner interview with the author, May 30, 2007.

10. Ibid.

11. HHIA, April 11, 2007; Kimberly Conrad Hefner interview with the author. May 30,
2007; “Kimberly Conrad Gets Her Playboy,” USA Today, April 25, 1989; and HH,
quoted in “Love Rurns Anew for This Playboy,” USA Today, March 8, 1988.

NOTES TO PAGES 396-404

505

12. Dick and Anne Stewart interview with Murray Fisher, Dec. 1992; Anne Stewart,
“Palimony, Smalimony” article ms., undated, 13-14, HP; Chuck McCann interview
with Geoff Miller, winter 1989; Lisa Loving interview with Murray Fisher, Jan. 18,
1993; Jessica Halm, “Other Voices,” HP; and Joni Mattis, quoted in “Hugh Hefner,
Husband,” USA Weekend , June 9-11, 1989.

13. Jessica Hahn, “Other Voices,” HP; Halm quoted in “Kimberly Conrad Gets Her
Playboy,” USA Today, April 25, 1989; Richard Brooks, “Other Voices,” HP; HH
quoted in Robert Reinhold, “Hefner Says Playing Days Are Over,” New York Times,
July 28, 1988; and HH, quoted in “Love Burns Anew for This Playboy.”

14. HH, quoted in “Love Bums Anew for This Playboy”; HH, quoted in “Mrs. Hef ?” Los
Angeles Times, Oct. 21, 1988; Kimberly Conrad notes on HH’s proposal, in HH to
Patrick Anderson and Murray Fisher, July 6, 1992; and HS 821.

15. “Mrs. Hef?” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 21, 1988; Conrad, quoted in “Cinderella and
the Playboy,” Chicago Tribune, May 4, 1989, and in “C’mon Hef,” Sacramento Bee
Magazine, Jan. 15, 1989, 9; and HH, quoted in “Mrs. Hef?”

16. HH, quoted in “C'mon Hef.”

17. Barbi Benton, Sondra Theodore, and Shannon Tweed, quoted in “Hugh Hefner,
Husband,” USA Weekend, June 9-11, 1989.

18. HS 846, “This Playmate of the Year Is a Playmate for a Lifetime,” Playboy, June
1989, 128-136, and quote on 152; Jeannine Stein, “Hefner Wedding: Strictly Top
Hat, Tails,” Los Angeles Tunes, June 27, 1989; and HH, quoted in “Hef Gains a
Bride, Loses a Reputation,” People, July 17, 1989, 38.

19. HS 854 and 855; Shannon Nix, “Inside Hefners Wedding,” San Francisco Chron-
icle, July 3, 1989; and “Hef Gains a Bride, Loses a Reputation.”

20. Ibid.

21. Cover of People, July 19, 1989, and HHIA, April 11, 2007.

22. HH, quoted in Luaine Lee, “Stargazing: Hefners Finally Hooked,” Pasadena Star-
News, April 28, 1989; Anne Taylor Fleming, “Ramparts Tremble When Hefner
Says ‘I Do,’” New York Times, July 5, 1989; Suzanne Fields, “Hefner a Herald of
the 90s?” Washington Times, July 6, 1989; and HH, quoted in “Hef Gains a Bride,
Loses a Reputation,” People, July 17, 1989.

23. HH to Larry DuBois and Murray Fisher, June 4, 1990; Inside the Playboy Mansion,
292-293; and “Hef Swaps Bunnies for Babies,” London Daily Express, Dec. 2, 1993.

24. Lisa Loving interview with Murray Fisher, Jan. 18, 1993; Kimberly Conrad Hefner
interview with the author, May 30, 2007; and “Queen of the Hutch,” Vancouver,
Nov. 1988, 42.

25. “Changes at the Mansion,” Edmonton Sun, July 4, 1989; “Hef Gains a Bride, Loses
a Reputation,” People, July 17, 1989, 39; “Mrs. Bunny,” Life, 104; and Kimberly
Conrad Hefner interview with the author, May 30, 2007.

26. “Mrs. Bunny,” Life, Sept. 1989, 102-107; Philip Marchand, “Hef and the Missus,”
Chatelaine, Sept. 1989, 64—69, 117; and Roger Simon, “Sin Is a Piece of Cake at
Playboy Mansion,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 4, 1992.

27. Doonesbury, Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1989, and August 19, 1989.

28. Kimberly Conrad Hefner, 2000 interview for E! Hollywood Story, HP; Kimberly
Conrad Hefner interview with the author, August 10, 2007; “Hef, Wife Expecting,”
Hollywood Reporter, Aug. 31, 1989; and HS 876, 910.

29. HHIA, April 11, 2007; Jeff Yarborough, “Hugh Hefner: The Advocate Interview,”
Advocate, March 8, 1994, 41; HS 897; Inside the Playboy Mansion, 303, 313; and
HH, quoted in “Sin Is a Piece of Cake at the Playboy Mansion,” Los Angeles Times,
Oct. 4, 1992.

30. Kimberly Conrad Hefner interview with the author. May 30, 2007; Steve Powers
interview with Bob Carr, March 1990; Steve Powers, quoted in Inside the Playboy

506

NOTES TO PAGES 404-409

Mansion, 301; Dante departure note in HS 974; Kimberly Conrad Hefner, 2000
interview for E! Hollywood Story, HP; and Inside the Playboy Mansion, 304, 312.

31. HH, quoted in the following: Joe Chidley, “Hef at Home,” Maclean’s, Aug. 15, 1994,
40; “Hugh Hefner: The Father of the Sexual Revolution Still Thinks He Knows
Best,” Details, April 1993, 131; “Playboy Interviewed: Hugh Hefner Talks of Life,”
Miami Herald, Nov. 18, 1992; Roger Simon, “All-American Dream Comes True
for Hefner,” Arlington Heights Daily Herald, Oct. 3, 1992; “Partying with Hugh
Hefner, Chicago Southtown Economist, Oct. 18, 1992; “Def Hef; Hugh Hefner on
Feminism, Fatherhood, and Forty Years of Centerfolds,” Buzz, Nov./Dec. 1992,
115; Daniel Ritz, “Hugh Hefner: Right Hand Man,” Arena, Autumn 1994, 64;
“Playboy Founder Hugh Hefner Enjoys Life at 70,” Reuters World Service news
release, April 8, 1996; and HH to Murray Fisher, March 1, 1991, HP. See also HH s
statements in Inside the Playboy Mansion, 303, 308.

32. “Playboy Interviewed: Hugh Hefner Talks of Life,” Miami Herald, Nov. 18, 1992;
“Hef Lifestyle Rlossoms into Prime Time,” Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 8, 1993;
and “Hef s Newest Playmate,” People, May 7, 1990.

33. Keith Hefner, “Other Voices,” HP; Joe Piastro interview, April 6, 1990, HP; and
Steve Powers to HH, April 9, 1996, HP.

34. “Hef s Haven,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 22, 1991; Cheryl Lavin, “The Happy Hef-
ners,” Chicago Tribune, March 28, 1990; “The Taming of a Playboy,” Los Angeles
Times, Nov. 11, 1992; and Roger Simon, “All-American Dream Comes True for
Hefner,” Buffalo Daily Herald, Oct. 3, 1992.

35. The genesis of Once Upon a Time is explained by Hefner in Chris Willman, “Hugh
Hefner: The Taming of a Playboy,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 11, 1992, and in “Chro-
nology of Events, 1988-1992,” 14—15, HP. Hefner, quoted in Once Upon a Time,
1992, produced by David Lynch and Mark Frost, directed by Gary Grossman and
Rob Heath. The film drew a mixed critical response. See “‘Hugh Hefner: Once Upon
a Time,’ An Airbrushed Life,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 13, 1992, and other reviews
in HS 946, 947. Another documentary, this time for A&E Biography, would appear
in 1996: Hugh Hefner: American Playboy, produced and directed by Kevin Bums.

CHAPTER 20. ALL IN THE FAMILY

1. “Classic Kimberly,” Playboy, Sept. 1995.

2. See the following in the New York Times: Philip K. Dougherty, “Social Analysis
From Good Housekeeping,” Aug. 11, 1988; Randall Rothenberg, “Proclaiming a
Decade of Decency,” Jan. 2, 1990; Stuart Elliott, “Good Housekeeping Modifies Its
Campaign Celebrating Families,” Mar. 29, 1993; and Stuart Elliott, “A Family Cir-
cle Campaign with Unexpected Images,” Jan. 4, 1992. For leftist, feminist critiques
of these campaigns, see Marcy Darnovsky, “The New Traditionalism: Repackaging
Ms. Consumer,” Social Text, 29 (1991): 72-91, and D. A. Leslie, “Femininity, Post-
Fordism, and the New Traditionalism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 11 (1993): 689-708.

3. Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think
About God, Country, Family, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the
Right, the Left, and Each Other (New York, 1998), 322. For two perceptive reviews
of Wolfe s book, see Richard Bernstein, “Finding Harmony Amid the Diversity,”
New York Times, Feb. 25, 1998, and Jonathan Rieder, “The Muddled Middle,”
Slate, March 11, 1998. For a similar analysis of the 1990s from a political sci-
entist that links a new traditionalism to Clintonian politics, see Edward Ashbee,
“ ‘Remoralization’: American Society and Politics in the 1990s,” Political Quar-
terly, April-June 2000, 192-201. An amusing variant of this interpretation came in
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

NOTES TO PAGES 409-415

507

(New York, 2000), which analyzed the “bourgeois bohemian” as the predominant
style of America’s elite establishment in the 1990s — the individual who has “wedded
the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian
counterculture,”

4. See “Sex in America,” cover story in U.S. News and World Report, Oct. 17, 1994,
74 — 81; “Sex in America,” cover story in Time, Oct. 17, 1994, 62-71; and “Not Fren-
zied, But Fulfilled,” Newsweek, Oct. 17, 1994, 70-71. For the popular version of
the report, see Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, Edward O. Laumann, and Gina
Kolata, Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (New York, 1994). The lengthier, full
report was published as The Social Organization of Sexuality by the University of
Chicago Press.

5. HH, quoted in “Sex in America,” Time, 64; HH memo, “Two Books on Sex,” Oct.
12, 1994, HP; and James R. Petersen, “The Great Sex Survey Hoopla,” Playboy,
Feb. 1995, 42-43.

6. “Queen of the Hutch,” Vancouver, Nov. 1988, 42; Joe Chidley, “Hef at Horne,” Maclean’s,
Aug. 15, 1994, 40; and “Hugh Hefner, Husband,” USA Weekend, June 9-11, 1989.

7. Tom Lowry, “The Naked Truth About Playboy: It’s Forty Years Old,” New York
Daily News, Dec. 5, 1993.

8. Christie Hefner, quoted in the following: “Inside Hefners Wedding,” San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, July 3, 1989; “Promoting Pleasure for Profit,” World Link, May
1989, 67; “Playboy and Leisure Time Marketing in the 1990s,” Town Hall Journal,
Aug. 8, 1989, 123; “Christie Hefner Is Reshaping and Reviving Her Father’s Adult
Empire,” Washington Post, Aug. 3, 1997; and Memo to Playboy List titled “Man-
sion and Hef Positioning,” Sept. 4, 1992, HP.

9. “The Mike Who Would Be Hef,” Inside Media, Jan. 10, 1990, cover, 27-31.

10. “Generation X,” Playboy, Dec. 1992.

11. See in Playboy : Roger Simon, “See Ross Run,” Aug. 1992; David Heilbroner,
“Blundering Toward Waco,” Sept. 1993; Joe Morgenstem, “Profit Without Honor,”
April 1992; Hugh Hefner, “Just Say No,” Nov. 1992; HH on Bill Mailer’s Politically
Incorrect, Feb. 6, 1997, HS 1169 and tape of show in HP; and HH on Larry King
Live, April 17, 1997, HS 1181, and tape of show in HP.

12. See in Playboy: Rogier van Bakel, “Digital Rush,” Sept. 1996; Dawn Gordon,
“Are You Sure S. Bull Has an Unlisted Number?” March 1990; Jonathan Takiff,
“Playboy’s Electronic Lexicon,” May 1994; J. C. Herz, “Confessions of an Internet
Junkie,” June 1994; and Ted C. Fishman, “Ten Cool Things You Can Do With Your
Computer,” June 1996.

13. See in Playboy, April 1996: “Women of the Internet” and “Virtually Gillian.”

14. See two PEI press releases dated Feb. 13, 1992, both in HP — “Playboy Exposes
the Real Man to Madison Avenue” and “What Men’s Movement?” — and Playboy,
Sept. 1992, 3, and “Mantrack,” 31-34.

15. See in Playboy: Asa Baber, “Men,” Oct. 1994; and Dennis Boyles and Mathew
Childs, “Manly Pursuits,” May 1993.

16. See in Playboy: Gene Stone, “Clarissa Explains It All,” July 1994; Julie Rigby, “A
Man’s Guide to TV Talk Shows,” Aug. 1994; and Tracey Pepper, “Finally, the Rules
of Dating,” July 1994.

17. “What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?” Playboy, April 1998, 65, and Feb. 1998, 59.

18. On Wildmon’s controversial endeavors, see “The Gospel on Trash TV,” Chicago
Tribune, May 22, 1989, and “Religious Right May Be in for a Fight,” Los Angeles
Times, May 20, 1991. On Playboy’s initial reaction, see the following memos in HP:
HH to Christie Hefner, May 22, 1989; Arthur Kretchmer to Christie Hefner, May
16, 1989; and Christie Hefner to HH, May 25, 1989. Playboy’s subsequent actions
are listed in “Chronology of Events, 1988-1992,” HP.

508

NOTES TO PAGES 415-422

19. See “Sexual Correctness: Has It Gone Too Far?” cover story, Newsweek, October
25, 1993, for good background on this phenomenon, while HH was quoted in
Jeff Yarbrough, “Hugh Hefner: The Advocate Interview,” Advocate, March 8,
1994, 43.

20. See Dick Morris’s explication of the “ Triangulation” strategy in his book Behind the
Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties (New York, 1997), and in “The
Clinton Years: Interview with Dick Morris,” PBS Frontline (2000), www.pbs.org.

21. Joe Queenan, “Wake Up and Smell the Nineties,” Playboy, Jan. 1992.

22. Peter Nelson, “Navigating the Nineties: The P.C. Survival Guide,” Playboy, Jan.
1992.

23. See in Playboy: Jonathan Franklin, “Inside Buchanans Bunker,” April 1996; Mark
Bowden, “Holy Terror,” February 1999; Ben Fenwick, “The Road to Oklahoma
City,” June 1997; and Cohn Campbell and Deborah Scroggins, “Very Weird Sci-
ence,” Dec. 1995.

24. See in Playboy: Garry Wills, “Columbus Go Home,” Jan. 1992; Vincent Bugliosi,
“Outrage: The Reasons O. J. Simpson Got Away With Murder,” July 1996; Mathew
Child, “Politically Correct Speech: A Guide to Who Can Say What to Whom on
Campus,” Oct. 1991; Chip Rowe, “The Safe Generation,” June 1995; and Doug
Hornig, “The Big Chill on Campus Sex,” Nov. 1993.

25. James R. Petersen, “Showdown in Cincinnati,” Playboy, March 1991, and “Hugh
Hefner: The Advocate Interview,” Advocate, March 8, 1994, 42.

26. See in Playboy: Pete Hamill, “Woman on the Verge of a Legal Breakdown,” Jan.
1993; Ted Fishman, “Hatefest: Hanging Out at a Feminist Legal Conference,”
Aug. 1993; and James R. Petersen and Linda Strom, “Forum: Whiplash,” July 1992.
See also James Petersen, “Catharine McKinnon: Again,” Aug. 1992. For similar
mainstream liberal rejections of MacKinnon and her ilk, see John Irving, “Pornog-
raphy and the New Puritans,” New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1992, and
Carlin Romano, “Between the Motion and the Act,” Nation, Nov. 15, 1993, which
concludes, “The first settlers in America came here to get away from people like
Catharine MacKinnon. . . . She is an authoritarian in the guise of a progressive.”

27. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? Flow Women Have Betrayed
Women (New York, 1994), 22, 134-135, 224-226, 230. In Playboy, see Jack Kam-
mer, “Interviews with Feminists on the War Between the Sexes,” Feb. 1994;
Warren Farrell, “The Myth of Male Power,” July and August 1993; and Katie
Roiphe, “Date-Rape Hysteria: The Feminist Resurrection of Victorian Morals,”
May 1992.

28. “Playboy Interview: Betty Friedan,” Plaijboy, Sept. 1992.

29. Betty Friedan, Fountain of Age (New York, 1993), 623-624; “Now, the Second
Revolution,” Newsweek, Oct. 4, 1993, 78; and Betty Friedan, “Why Men Die
Young,” Playboy, April 1995.

30. See in Playboy: “20 Questions: Camille Paglia,” Oct. 1991; “Playboy Interview: Camille
Paglia,” May 1995; and Camille Paglia, “The Return of Carrie Nation,” Oct. 1992.

31. See in Playboy: Tawni Cable, “Cable Ready,” Miss June 1989, 117; Alicia Rickter,
“Earth Shaker,” Miss October 1995; and “Domestic Bliss,” August 1992.

32. “Playboys History of the Sexual Revolution,” by James R. Petersen, ran from Nov.
1996 to Nov. 1999. The quotes come from the final installment, “Who Won the
Sex War?” Playboy, Nov. 1999. See also Glenn O’Brien, “Flirting With Feminists,”
Playboy, April 1993.

33. Michael Kelly, “Sex Is Back,” Playboy, May 1990.

34. “Hef Swaps Bunnies for Babies,” London Daily Express, Dec. 2, 1993, and HH,
“Playboy 2000: A Celebration of the Postfeminist, Postmodern Man,” Playboy,
April 1996, 47.

NOTES TO PAGES 422-425

509

35. See in Plaijboy: Robert Scheer, “Lust in the White House,” May 1992, 39; Asa
Baber, “A Good Man,” Sept. 1995, 30; Ted Fishman, “The Playboy Forum: By
Our Scandals We Are Known,” Playboy, July 1998, 55; James R. Petersen, “The
Rules of an Affair,” Playboy, February 1999, 49; and Hugh Hefner, “The Playboy
President,” Playboy, May 1998, 11.

36. “Playboys Hefner to Step Down,” Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 13, 1988. See also
“Playboy Founder Hugh Hefner Plans to Name Daughter to Firm’s Top Job,” Wall
Street Journal, Sept. 13, 1988, and “Hefners 35-Year Reign at Playboy Drawing to
an End,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 13, 1988.

37. HS 871; “Playboy Interview: Christie Hefner,” Playboy Enterprises Inc., special
publication, 1990; and “Troubled Playboy Enterprises Streamlining for ‘90s,” Dal-
las Morning News, Sept. 23, 1989.

38. “Goodbye to Bunny Girls,” Business Week, Nov. 14, 1988.

39. “Playboy Brings in New Management,” Publishing News, June-July 1989; “Playboy
Expected to Hire Chiat to Put Ad-Buyers in the Mood,” Wall Street Journal, May
16, 1990; and Karen Stabiner, “Hef II,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, Sept. 10,
1989, 10.

40. “Christie Hefner Is Reshaping and Reviving Her Fathers Adult Empire,” Washing-
ton Post, Aug. 3, 1997, and Karen Stabiner, “Hef II,” Los Angeles Times Magazine,
Sept. 10, 1989, 10.

41. On PEI’s business strategy, see “Christie Hefner Takes Reins of Tamer Playboy,”
Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 14, 1988; Karen Stabiner, “Hef II,” Los Angeles Times
Magazine, Sept. 10, 1989, 10; “Playboy Trying New Poses to Improve Growth
Picture,” Crain’s Chicago Business, Nov. 14, 1988; “Goodbye to Bunny Girls,”
Business Week, Nov. 14, 1988; “Playboy Reports $3.8 Million Loss for Fiscal ’89,”
Magazine Week, Sept. 4, 1989; and “Playboy to Split Shares into Voting, Nonvot-
ing Classes,” Wall Street Journal, May 8, 1990. On foreign markets, see “Troubled
Playboy Enterprises Streamlining for ’90s,” Dallas Morning News, Sept. 23, 1989;
“Christie Hefner,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 7, 1990; “Playboy Enterprises Refocuses
the Dream,” Bloomberg, Sept. 1993, 65-66; and “Playboy Looks Overseas as U.S.
Climate Grows Hostile,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 29, 1993. On electronic proj-
ects, see “Playboy Enterprises Refocuses the Dream,” Bloomberg, Sept. 1993,
65-66; “Playboy Seeks a Place in the Electronic Future,” New York Times, Dec. 21,
1993; “Playboy Pins Hopes on Net,” CNET News.com, March 19, 1998; and “K-Tel
Gets Into Bed with Playboy Online,” New York Post, Nov. 4, 1998.

42. “Christie Hefner Is Reshaping and Reviving Her Father’s Adult Empire,” Washing-
ton Post, Aug. 3, 1997, and Karen Stabiner, “Hef II,” Los Angeles Times Magazine,
Sept. 10, 1989, 16.

43. See “Playboy’s Strategic Overhaul Has Wall St. Talking Turnaround,” Crain’s Chi-
cago Business, Sept. 25, 1989; “Playboy Looks Overseas as U.S. Climate Grows
Hostile,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 29, 1993; “Playboy’s Fortunes Tied to the
Bunny,” Advertising Age, Oct. 24, 1994; “Playboy Cuts Work Force,” New York
Times, Sept. 29, 1993; “Playboy to Cut 60 Jobs, Post Operating Loss in Quarter,”
Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 28, 1993; “Playboy Trying New Poses to Improve Growth
Picture,” Crain’s Chicago Business, Nov. 14, 1988; “Playboy Reports $3.8 Million
Loss for Fiscal ’89, Magazine Week, Sept. 4, 1989; “Earnings,” Chicago Sun-Times,
Aug. 6, 1992; and “Earnings,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 5, 1993.

44. On PEI projects, see “Bunny’s Gamble,” Crain’s Chicago Business, Aug. 25, 1997;
“Spicing Up Playboy,” Cable, Feb. 9, 1998; “Playboy Spices Up Its Adult Business,”
Multichannel News, Feb. 9, 1998; “Deal Gives Playboy Monopoly on Adult TV,” USA
Today, Feb. 5, 1998; “Playboy Tries to Pick Up Women,” CNET News.com, Nov. 10,
1998; and “Can Aging Playboy Lure Women?” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 10, 1998.

510

NOTES TO PAGES 425-431

On profit figures, see “Playboy Hires Creative Artists to Find Investors to Fuel
Ambitious Expansion,” Wall Street Journal , Nov. 7, 1995; “A Titillating Takeoff for
’97 Earnings at Playboy,” Hollywood Reporter, Aug. 16, 1997; and “Pulling Rabbits
out of Hats,” Chief Executive, Sept. 1999, 48 — 49.

45. Joanna Piros, “Paradise Found,” Vancouver Lifestyle , Dec. 1997, 50, 53.

CHAPTER 21. BACK IN THE GAME

1. See Mr. Playboy, A&E Biography, for film segments of the New Year’s Eve 1997
party. HH’s scrapbook volume for the event, HS 214, is titled “New Year’s Eve
without Kimber,” while a picture of the publisher with a bunch of pretty girls has
the caption “Hef alone in a crowd.” HS 1215 is titled “Alone and Lonely.”

2. “Hefners to Split,” Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 21, 1998; “Playboy King, Wife Split,”
New York Post, Jan. 21, 1998; and “Splitting Hares,” People, Feb. 9, 1998.

3. Philip Marchand, “Hef and the Missus,” Chatelaine, Sept. 1989, 117.

4. Dick and Anne Stewart to HH and Kimberly Conrad Hefner, May 6, 1995, HS 1064.

5. Kimberly Conrad Hefner in an interview with the author on August 10, 2007,
politely but firmly refused to discuss anything regarding the breakup of the mar-
riage. She spoke similarly in a 2000 interview for El Hollywood Story, tape in HP.

6. Kimberly Conrad Hefner, quoted in Bill Zehme, “The Man Who Loved Women,”
Esquire, Aug. 1998, 66; an unnamed “Mansion source,” quoted in “Hefners to Split,”
Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 21, 1998; Kimberly Conrad Hefner and Mark Saginor,
quoted in “Splitting Hares,” People, Feb. 9, 1998, 147-148. Dick and Anne Stewart,
in an interview with the author on August 7, 2007, confirmed this point.

7. Kimberly Conrad Hefner, quoted in Joe Chidley, “Hef at Home,” Macleans, Aug.
15, 1994, 40, and in “Splitting Hares,” People, Feb. 9, 1998, 148; Kimberly Conrad
Hefner, interview with the author, May 30, 2007; and Bill Zehme, “The Man Who
Loved Women,” 141. Dick and Anne Stewart, interview with author, Aug. 7, 2007,
discussed Conrad Hefner’s frustrations about creating a home at the mansion.

8. Kimberly Conrad Hefner, quoted in Bill Zehme, “ The Man Who Loved Women,”
Esquire, Aug. 1998, 66, and in Joe Chidley, “Hef at Home,” Maclean’s, Aug. 15,
1994, 40. Conrad Hefner also raised the Lady Diana analogy in an interview with
the author, May 30, 2007.

9. HHIA, April 11 and Aug. 7, 2007.

10. HHIA, April 11, 2007, and HH, quoted in Bill Zehme, “The Man Who Loved
Women,” Esquire, Aug. 1998, 140.

11. HHIA, April 11, 2007, and HH, quoted in Lydia Martin, “Original Playboy Back
in Action,” Miami Herald, Nov. 22, 1999. HH also discussed his perceptions of the
marital collapse in “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 2000, 244.

12. HHIA, April 11, 2007, and August 9, 2006, and author’s interviews with several
regular mansion guests, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In 1997, according
to published press reports, Mark Speers, a security employee at the mansion, sued
Kimberly Hefner for sexual harassment, claiming that he had been fired from his
position because he had rejected her sexual advances. The lawsuit was settled out of
court in September 1997. HH defends his wife and says that this situation is unre-
lated to the earlier affairs that helped erode their marriage. On the Speer lawsuit,
see “Splitting Hares,” 147, and “Playboy King, Wife Split,” New York Post, Jan. 21,
1998.

13. HHIA, April 11, 2007, and HS 1135, 1137, and 1197, the latter of which is titled “A
Long, Lonely Summer.”

14. HHIA, April 11, 2007, and HH, quoted in Lydia Martin, “Original Playboy Back in
Action,” Miami Herald, Nov. 22, 1999, and in “Echoes of a Bunnyman,” interview
with Bob Guccione Jr., Gear, Sept./Oct. 1998, 87.

NOTES TO PAGES 431-435

511

15. Dick and Anne Stewart interview with the author, Aug. 7, 2007; HHIA, Aug. 7,
2007; and Bill Zehme, “The Man Who Loved Women,” Esquire , Aug. 1998, 61, 66,
60, 65, 63.

16. HHIA, Aug. 7, 2007; HS 1218, 1223, 1241; and HH to John Dante, May 18, 1998,
in HS 1242.

17. See in Playboy: Bill Zehme, “Inside the Playboy Mansion,” Dec. 1998; “ The World
of Playboy,” Jan. 1999, 19; and cartoon, Dec. 1999, 120.

18. HH, quoted in Marilyn Cole Lownes, “In It for the Bunnies,” Esquire (British
Edition), July 1999, 139, and in “Once Again, I’m a Babe Magnet,” London Daily
Telegraph, July 27, 1998; HS 1236, titled “Viva Viagra”; and HS 1280 and 1344.
See “The Potency Pill,” cover story in Time, May 4, 1998, 50-57, for an analysis of
Viagra’s arrival on the American scene.

19. See HS 1244, 1372, 1253, and 1270.

20. Mark Seal, “The Big Bunny Hops Again,” American Way, March 15, 2001, 64—65;
HH, quoted in Marilyn Cole Lownes, “In It for the Bunnies,” Esquire (British
Edition), July 1999, 139, in “Once Again, I’m a Babe Magnet,” London Daily Tele-
graph, July 27, 1998, in Lydia Martin, “Original Playboy Back in Action,” Miami
Herald, Nov. 22, 1999, and in “Razor Interview: Hugh Hefner,” Razor, April/May
2001, 42.

21. See HS 1425 and 1445, and Brande Roderick to HH, undated, probably in late
June 2000, and HH to Brande Roderick, June 30, 2000, both in HP. Yagalla had
met Sandy Bentley in the fall of 1999 and, according to published reports, began
to shower her with lavish gifts such as cars, diamonds, vacations, and a Las Vegas
residence. He also gave her a platinum American Express card on which she ran
up some $1 million in clothes, meals, travel, food, and collectibles. Mandy Bent-
ley also received a car and other gifts. After Yagalla’s arrest by the FBI, investors
mounted a lawsuit against him and tried to get their money back. The judge issued
an injunction barring the Bentleys from selling the gifts. See “Attorney Targets
Gifts to Model from Arrested Fund Manager,” USA Today, March 8, 2001; “Taking
Playmate s Toys,” New York Daily News, March 27, 2001; and especially Benjamin
Wallace, “The Prodigy and the Playmate,” Philadelphia, June 2001, 95-103, for the
full story of the relationship and the scandal.

22. Tina Jordan, quoted in Lucy Broadbent, “The Toughest Part of Being a Hef Babe
Is Getting Dressed,” Personal, Sept. 16, 2001, 8, and HS 1444, 1445, 1486, 1492,
1548, 1600, 1651, and 1699.

23. “Sexy at 75,” New York Post, March 12, 2001; “Citizen Hef,” Chicago Tribune
Magazine, Dec. 12, 1999, 16; HHIA, Aug. 7, 2007; “Playboy Interview: Hugh M.
Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 2000, 65; and Holly Madison, quoted in “Playboys First
Lady Tells All,” London Sunday Mirror, Dec. 7, 2003.

24. David Plotz, “Hugh Hefner: He Swings, He Misses,” Slate, July 21, 2000; “Playboy
or Bust” and “Party Politics,” Harpers Bazaar, Dec. 1999, 207, 225; and “The 1999
Hall of Fame,” Vanity Fair, Dec. 1999, 316-317.

25. HH, quoted in Marilyn Cole Lownes, “In It for the Bunnies,” Esquire (British Edi-
tion), July 1999, 139.

26. Playboy : 50th Anniversary Issue, Jan. 2004; advertisement, “Playboy: The Maga-
zine That Changed America,” New York Times, Dec. L, 2003; and Playboy’s 50th
Anniversary Celebration, A&E, Nov. 30, 2003, HP.

27. For reviews of Playboy’s 50th Anniversary Celebration on A&E, see Noel Holston,
“From Playboy to Platoon,” Newsday, Dec. 5, 2003, and David Bianculli, “Hef
Wins Booby Prize,” New York Daily News, Dec. 3, 2003.

28. Cal Thomas, “Only One Side of Hugh Hefners Playboy Legacy Is Being Told,”
Dallas Morning News, Jan. 5, 2004; Connie Schultz, “Sorry, Hef, But It Takes a

512

NOTES TO PAGES 436-440

Real Man to Celebrate the Beauty of Real Women,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct.
1, 2003; Suzanne Fields, “Yearning for a Glimpse of Shocking Stocking,” Townhall.
com, Dec. 15, 2003; and “The Hollow Victory of Hugh Hefner,” Christianity
Today, Dec. 2003, reprinted at christianitytoday.com.

29. “Playboy at 50: A Mans Notes,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 28, 2003; “Playboy at 50,”
Newsday, Oct. 2, 2003; Marilyn Cole Lownes, “The Oldest Swinger in Town,”
Times Magazine (London), Nov. 1, 2003, 29; Richard Corliss, “That Old Feeling:
Your Grandfathers Playboy,” Time, Jan. 3, 2004; and Catherine Seipp, “Living with
Playboy,” National Review Online, Jan. 13, 2004. For other respectful, largely posi-
tive critiques: “Playboy Turns 50,” Houston Chronicle, Dec. 14, 2003; “50 Years
Later, Playboy Still Swinging,” Chicago Sun-Times, Nov. 28, 2003; “Forget T&A,”
San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 11, 2003; and “The Original Playboy,” Ottawa Citi-
zen, Dec. 6, 2003.

30. “Playboy at 50: Cutting-Edge Becomes Almost Quaint,” Dayton, Dec. 8, 2003;
Brian McCoy, “Playboys Maturity Makes It Outdated,” Stockton Record, Dec. 19,
2003; Geoff Pevere, “Playboy Bunny Running Low on Batteries,” Toronto Star,
Jan. 3, 2004; and Richard Corliss, “That Old Feeling: Your Grandfathers Playboy,”
Time, Jan. 3, 2004.

31. David Brooks, “The Return of the Pig,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2003, reprinted in
TheAtlantic.com.

32. HH, quoted in “Hefner Decrees: Less Sex Better in New Plaijboy,” New York
Observer, Oct. 7, 2002, and Kretchmer, quoted in Greg Lindsay, “Rethinking a
Great American Magazine,” Folio, Nov. 1, 2002, at Foliomag.com.

33. HH, quoted in “Hefner Decrees: Less Sex Better in New Plaijboy," New York
Observer, Oct. 7, 2002.

34. Kaminsky, quoted in the following: “Playboy’s Mr. October,” Newsday, Sept. 23,
2002; “Playboy’s New Editor Reshapes Aging Bunny,” Reuters, May 6, 2003; “Defin-
ing ‘Cool’ for a New Age: Playboy Tries to Modernize in Face of Competition,” New
York Times, April 23, 2003; “The Original Playboy,” Ottawa Citizen, Dec. 8, 2002;
“What Playboy Means to Sex and Pop Culture,” Kansas City Star, Dec. 2, 2003;
and “Playboy Makeover Aims to Lure Younger Readers,” Chicago Tribune, Nov.
30, 2003.

35. “Playboy’s Overhaul,” Onion, Oct. 30, 2002, reprinted in theonion.com, and “An
Uneasy Alliance in Revised Playboy,” Chicago Tribune, June 29, 2003.

36. HHIA, Aug. 7, 2007.

37. Ibid.

38. “Playboy’s Not-So-Energized Bunny,” Rusiness Week, Dec. 4, 2000, 44, and CH to
Stephen Shepard, Editor-in-Chief, Rusiness Week, Nov. 28, 2000, HP, later published
in Rusiness Week, Dec. 18, 2000. At a business forum in Los Angeles in December
2000, Christie Hefner also vented her anger at the article, bluntly calling it “full of
shit.” See “Playboy CEO Is Hopping Mad,” Wirednews.com., Dec. 8, 2000.

39. For a comprehensive, insightful analysis of PEI’s business strategy since the early
1980s, see Greg Bums, “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” Chicago Tribune Magazine,
Oct. 16, 2005. CH discussed aspects of the company’s strategy in an interview with
the author on Sept. 14, 2007. On the controversial Spice TV purchase, see “Playboy
Gets More Explicit,” Washington Post, July 3, 2001; “Playboy Sheds Gentleman’s
Cloak, Buys XX TV Channels,” Los Angeles Times, July3, 2001; “Playboy to Acquire
3 Cable Purveyors of Hard-Core Sex,” Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2001; “Playboy
Goes XXX,” Newsweek, July 16, 2001; and “Publishing,” Delaney Report: Interna-
tional Newsletter for Marketing, Advertising, and Media Executives, July 9, 2001.

40. Among a host of articles on PEI’s profits, restructuring, and projects in recent
years, see “Playboy Boots Publishing Executives as Ad Market Wanes,” USA Today,

NOTES TO PAGES 440-447

513

Dec. 4, 2000; “Playboy to Slash Headcount at Its Online Operations,” Wall Street
Journal, Oct. 11, 2001; “Playboy Enterprises, Inc. Announces Restructuring,”
PEI press release, Nov. 21, 2002, HP; “Playboy to Revive Club, and Runnies,
in Las Vegas,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 6, 2004; “Playboy Enterprises Reports
Strong 2005 Results,” Lexdon.com, Feb. 14, 2006; “Playboy Says It’s Not for Sale,”
CNNMoney.com, Feb. 13, 2007; and “Playboy Perks Up Its Ears,” Chicago Sun-
Times, Aug. 28, 2007. A convenient chart of PEI’s net income/loss year-by-year
from 1971 to 2004 is in Greg Bums, “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” Chicago Tri-
bune Magazine, October 16, 2005, 18, and the quote comes from that same page.
Christie Hefner discussed the company’s most recent projects, and her hopes for a
prosperous future, in an interview with the author. Sept. 14, 2007.

41. On Playboy’s revived appeal, see HH in “Razor Interview; Hugh Hefner,” Razor,
April/May 2001, 42.

42. “Friday Night Movie Notes,” March 4, 2005, HS 1895. Richard Bann, Hefner’s
good friend and a film historian, assists with research and sketches rough drafts of
the publisher’s weekly film talks.

43. Bill Zehme, “The Man Who Loved Women,” Esquire, Aug. 1998, 60, and Wil
Hylton, “Hugh Hefner,” Rolling Stone, Aug. 31, 2000, 60.

44. See HS 1237, 1567, 1604, 1913, and “It’s Hugh Hefner to the Rescue,” Los Angeles
Times, July 25, 2002.

45. See HS 1398, 1567, 1754, 1755, “HH's Carl’s Jr. Advertisement” tape, HP. On the
conservative outcry against the Carl’s Jr. ad, see “Hefner Ads Too Close for College’s
Comfort,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 21, 2003.

46. See HS 1489, 1685, 1759, 1783, 1890, 1897, and 1893.

47. “Gore Confronted by New Issue; Playboy,” New York Times, Aug. 12, 2000; “Men-
tioning Playboy Gives Democrats the Jitters,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 12, 2000; “San-
chez Out Again as Convention Speaker,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 15, 2000; and HH,
quoted in “Hefner Calls Dems Hypocrites,” USA Today, Aug. 14, 2000, and “When
Mansion Can Barely Be Mentioned,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12, 2000.

48. On the changing of the guard among HH’s girlfriends, see HS 1816 and 1823.

49. Holly Madison interview with author, August 11, 2007. See also Holly Madison to
Tina Jordan, Sept. 1, 2002, HS 1651. and “Playboy’s First Lady Tells All,” London
Sunday Mirror, Dec. 7, 2003.

50. Bridget Marquardt interview with the author, Aug. 6, 2007.

51. Kendra Wilkinson interview with the author, Aug. 6, 2007.

52. Ad for premiere of The Girls Next Door in summer 2005, HP.

53. “E! Entertainment Television Unveils Its Most Aggressive Slate,” press release, May 11,
2005, HS 1911, and Daphne Merkin, “I Dream of Holly (and Bridget, and Kendra),”
Elle, June 2007, 201. The show’s appeal to professional women and feminists is also
examined in “Why Women Love ‘Girls Next Door,”’ New York Post, Aug. 6, 2007.

. “I Dream of Holly,” 260, and Marquardt interview with author, Aug. 6, 2007.

. Lawyer quoted in “Why Women Love the ‘Girl Next Door’”; “I Dream of Holly,”
260; and Marquardt interview with author, Aug. 6, 2007.

56. HHIA, April 11, 2007. The columnist’s reflection on Hefner “winning” appeared
in George Will, “At 77, Hefner’s the Life of the Party,” syndicated column printed
in, for example, the Columbia Daily Tribune, June 3, 2003.

EPILOGUE. PLAYBOY NATION

1. Kevin Burns, quoted in Daphne Merkin, “I Dream of Holly (and Bridget, and Ken-
dra),” Elle, June 2007, 201; HH on the magazine and his life as his greatest creation
in “Razor Interview; Hugh Hefner,” Razor, April/May 2001, 42; and HH, quoted in
“Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 1974, 70.

514

NOTES TO PAGES 448-454

2. HH to author, Oct, 18, 2007, and HH, quoted in “Citizen Hef,” Chicago Tribune
Magazine, Dec. 12, 1999, 15. For other HH statements on the need for personal
liberation, see “Def Hef: Hugh Hefner on Feminism, Fatherhood, and Forty Years
of Centerfolds,” Buzz, Nov./Dec. 1992, 68; “Playboy Interview: Hugh M. Hefner,”
Playboy, Jan. 1974, 72; “Hugh Hefner: The Father of the Sexual Revolution Still
Thinks He Knows Best,” Details, April 1993, 131; and “Playboy Interview: Hugh
M. Hefner,” Playboy, Jan. 2000, 245.

3. HH, quoted in “Citizen Hef,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, Dec. 12, 1999, 23.

4. David Shaw, “After 50 Years of Playboy, We All Live in Hef s World,” Los Angeles
Times, May 4, 2003.

5. Cartoon by Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dec. 4, 2003.

6. Reed Johnson, “Playboy at 50: A Mans Notes,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 28, 2003;
“Camille Paglia: Playboy Interview,” Playboy, May 1995, 62; and John Zobenica,
“Are We Not Men? Down the Ladder from Playboy to Maxim,” TheAtlantic.com,
January/February 2007.

7. The phrase “consumer s republic” is from Elizabeth Cohen, The Consuiner’s Repub-
lic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003), while
the quote is from Richard Corliss, “That Old Feeling: Your Grandfathers Playboy,”
Time, Jan. 3, 2004.

8. See the authors The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century
(New York, 2005) and The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of
Life (New York, 1997).

9. Robert Coles, “Transforming American Sexuality,” New York Times Book Review,
May 4, 1980, 6, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Naked Republic,” New Yorker,
Aug. 25 and Sept. 1, 1997, 123.

10. HH, quoted in “Hugh Hefner: The Man Who Started It All Speaks Boldly,”
Bold, Dec. 2000, 29, and F. Scott Fitgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York, 1925
[2004]), 180.

INDEX

Aardvark, 172
ABC, 278-279, 291, 333
abortion, 179-180, 344
“A-Card Blues, The” (Hefner), 31
Accused, 47
ACLU, 275, 376
Adams, Don, 145, 157
advertising, 102, 114, 127-128, 154,
189, 423
Hefner in, 442

Playboy changes and, 305-306, 414
Playboy Jazz Festival (1959) and, 95,
135-136

“Playboy Header,” 309
Advertising Age, 75
“After the Masquerade” (Hefner), 59
Against Our Will (Brownmiller), 370
aging, Friedan on, 419
AIDS, 347, 357
Ah, Muhammad, 278, 306
alimony. Playboy on, 72, 78, 119, 233
Allen, Steve, 172
Allen, Woody, 210
Allred, Gloria, 344, 386
All the President’s Men (Bernstein,
Woodward), 309
Alpert, Hollis, 189

American Booksellers Association, 375
American Chronicles, 405^06
American National Exhibition, 137
American Nazi Party, 196

“American Sexual Revolution, The”
(radio broadcasts), 176
Amis, Martin, 349
Anderson, Pamela, 411
Anthony, Ray, 441
Antioch College, 415
Antioch Review, 178
anti-Semitism, 37, 50
Ara, Reverend Charles D., 399
Amstein, Bobbie, 212, 254, 256
arrest of, 258-267
suicide of, 267-270
Amstein, Eddie, 260
Associated Press, 154
Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 241
Atlantic City, 340-342, 350
Avener, Robin, 354

Baber, Asa, 355-356, 413
Babs and Shirley (Playboy), 131,

146, 231
Baby Face, 441
Bachman, Curtis, 14
Bachman, Jimmy, 14
backgammon, 286-288
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against
American Women (Faludi), 418
Bakker, Jim, 361
Baldwin, James, 197
Bann, Richard, 441
Barnum, P. T„ 172

515

516

INDEX

“Basic Bar” {Playboy), 125
Basie, Count, 95, 135
Baumgarth, John, 64
Beach Book, The (Steinem), 238
Bealls, Sally, 204
Beats, 74, 133-134
Beatty, Linda, 315
Beatty, Warren, 212, 280
Beaumont, Charles, 80, 97, 131
Becker, Judith, 368, 378
Bentley Mandy 432-433
Bentley Sandy 432-433
Benton, Barbi, 224-227, 251-258, 262,
280, 283

Conrad-Hefner marriage and, 398,
399^02

Playboy Mansion West found by,
273-274

Berliner, Joel, 432

Bernstein, Carl, 309

Bierce, Ambrose, 72

“Big Boobs” {New Republic), 379

“Big Bunny” (airplane), 209-210

“Bill Dodgely and Troop 31” (Hefner), 17

Bilbngs, Bobert, 326

Biowski, Edith, 31

birth control, 214, 215, 230

Bishop’s Study, The (radio show), 94

Bi-Weekly News (Hefner), 16

Black, Hugo, 177

Blackmun, Harry, 379

Black Widow, 366

Blossom (NBC), 404

Bogart, Humphrey, 204, 448-449

Bogdanovich, Peter, 334—336,

381-388, 393
Bonner, Gillian, 412
Boorstin, Daniel, 8, 144
Borson, Janie, 29, 32, 35, 39, 42, 45
Borst, Bon, 441

Bouras, Arlene, 91, 92, 99, 100, 101, 146

Boyd, Malcolm, 214

Bradbury, Bay, 80, 131

Bradley, Tom, 279

Bradshaw, Joan, 146

Braudy, Susan, 241-243

Britt, May, 153, 195

Brooks, Richard, 362, 363, 397

Brophy, Jim, 28-30, 32, 35, 61

Brown, Helen Gurley, 192

Brown, Jerry, 279

Brown, Jim, 286

Browning, Sheila, 146

Brownmiller, Susan, 236, 370

Brubeck, Dave, 79, 135

Bruce, Lenny, 141, 156, 190, 200, 261

Bryant, Jean, 315

Buchanan, Pat, 416

Buchwald, Art, 171, 298

Buckley, William F„ 3, 194, 209, 326, 379

Burns, Kevin, 441, 444, 447

Business Week, 439

Caan, James, 277, 278, 279, 280, 286, 442

Calderone, Mary, 215

Caniff, Milton, 27

Cantor, Mark, 441

Captain’s Paradise, The, 252

Carey Drew, 435

Carmichael, Carrie Lee. See Leigh, Carrie

Carnegie, Dale, 108

Carpenter, Teresa, 335-336

Carson Pirie Scott, 50-51, 52, 97

Carter, Jimmy, 312-313, 328, 351

Carter, Richard, 194

cartoons

Carter interview parodies, 312-313
early creations by Hefner, 15, 17, 30,
32, 36, 38, 52
featuring Hefner, 402
parodying Playboy, 348
Playboy features, 72, 97-98, 111,
130-131, 201
Reisman on, 369-370
Casablanca, 441, 448^49
Casilli, Mario, 332
Castro, Fidel, 211
Catholic World, 183-184
Cavett, Dick, 236
CBS, 224-225, 359
censorship, 376
Comstock Act (1873), 108
Hefner on, 78, 139
“Reagan Revolution” and, 325
U.S. Post Office lawsuit, 82-83
See also Meese Commission;
pornography
Chamberlain, Bev, 146
Champlin, Charles, 385
Chancellor, Connie, 146
Chancellor, John, 146
Chaplin, Charlie, 102, 139
Chatelaine, 402
Chiat/Day/Mojo, 423

N D EX

517

Chicago, 82
Chicago American, 154
Chicago Art Institute, 39
Chicago Carton Company, 50
Chicago Daily News, 57
Chicago Daily Tribune, 52
Chicago Herald- American, 52
Chicago Historical Society, 53
“Chicago Mansion, The” (Playboy),
199-200

Chicago Strike Force, 265, 266, 269
Chicago Sun-Times, 178, 258, 290, 292, 322
Chicago’s Urban League, 136
Chicago Tribune, 160, 258, 286, 405
Childrens Activities, 51
Childs, Marquis, 190, 194
Child Training Association, 51
Christianity. See religion
Christianity and Crisis, 180
Christianity Today, 435
Christian Science Monitor, 293
Christy, Karen, 253-257, 262, 264
“Classic Kimberly” (Playboy), 407
“clean sex,” 113, 173
Clinton, BUI, 408, 415, 422
Clouston, Bob, 29

cocaine, 259-260, 266-267, 310, 359

Cockbum, Alexander, 266, 329-330

“Coed of the Month” (Shaft), 46

Coffin, William Sloane, 216, 217

Cohen, Lizabeth, 124

Cohen, Richard, 322

Cohen, Steve, 423

Cold War, 137

Cole, Jack, 111, 130

Cole, Marilyn, 253, 302

Coleman, Cy, 155

“College Issue” (Playboy), 79

Columbia Journalism Review, 182-183

Columbia Pictures, 163

Columbia Records, 321

communism, 74, 75-76, 137-142, 210

Comstock Act (1873), 108

Conklin, Betty, 29, 31

Connery, Sean, 152

Conrad, Kimberly. See Hefner, Kimberly
Conrad (wife)

Conservative Digest, 347
consumerism, 108

Hefners political views and, 137
1970s economy and, 297-298,

308-309

promoted by Playboy, 73, 123-132,
450-453

Consumer Magazine Report, 132
“Contaminators, The” (Playboy), 101
contraception. See birth control
Cooper, Arthur, 352
Coppola, Francis Ford, 306
Corliss, Richard, 436
Comfeld, Bernie, 286, 301
Cosby, BiU, 224, 226, 279, 399
Cosmopolitan, 192, 239, 253
Cowie, Colin, 399

Cox, Harvey, 3, 5, 180, 185, 209, 216, 220

Crawford, Allan, 265

Crawford, Johnny, 441

Critics Choice, 424

Crothers, Diane, 236

Crowe, Cameron, 351

Culp, Robert, 441

Curtin, Jane, 291

Curtis, Patrick, 386

Curtis, Tony, 160, 163-165, 190, 277, 399
Cyber Club, 424

Daily Illini (University of Illinois at
Urbana), 40, 45, 46-47
Daily Northwestern (Northwestern
University), 83
Dale Harrison’s Chicago, 52
Daley, Richard, 145

Daniels, Derick, 318-322, 337-340, 343
Daniels, M. J. Taylor, 320
Daniel Starch & Staff, 132
Dante, John, 145, 212, 224, 254, 264,

341, 431

Conrad and, 395, 399, 403
in “Rabbit Pack,” 286
views on Leigh, 363, 365
Davis, Sammy, Jr., 153, 157, 160, 195, 277
Dawson, Richard, 279
“Death of a Playmate” (Carpenter),
335-336

“Death of Painting, The” (Playboy), 79
DeCarlo, Joe, 286, 341
Deep Throat, 303, 371-372
Delancey, Shirley, 146
Delgado, Linda, 354

Democratic National Convention (1968),
212-213, 326
DeMott, Benjamin, 173
Dempsey, John, 111
Derek, Bo, 350

518

INDEX

Detroit Free Press, 217-218
Dewhurst, Colleen, 376
dexamethasone, 393
Dexedrine, 198-199, 221, 259, 265,

287, 341

Dick Cavett Show, 236
Diephouse, Dorothy, 29
Dietz, Park, 368
Diners Club, 128
Dirsmith, Ron, 274—275
Disenchanted, The (Schulberg), 56
Disney, Walt, 452

divorce, Playboy on, 72, 119, 215, 233
Dobson, James C., 368
Donnerstein, Edward, 378
Doonesbury (Trudeau), 402
Douglas, William O., 6, 211, 216
Downs, Hugh, 53
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 72
Draper, Bruce, 228
drugs

Amstein and, 258-270
cocaine, 214, 259-260, 266-267,

310, 359

dexamethasone as stroke treatment, 393
Dexedrine used by Hefner, 198-199,
221, 259, 265, 287, 341
marijuana, 259, 266, 279, 326
Playboy on, 194, 211, 216, 266
Viagra used by Hefner, 432, 434
Duns Review, 271
duPont Registry, 424
Dworkin, Andrea, 367, 370-372, 372,

383, 418

E!, 443-446, 450

Edward Bennett Williams, 382-383

Ehrenreich, Barbara, 246, 385

Eisenberg, Billy, 286, 287, 288

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 75, 108, 140, 141

Eldridge, Burl, 386

Ellington, Duke, 129

Ellis, Albert, 178

Elsinore Corporation, 340, 342

Empire News, 69

England

PEI gaming operation in, 336-340, 345
Playboy Club expansion in, 206-208
Equal Rights Amendment, 279,

325, 344

“equity feminism,” 247, 417-422, 453
Espy, Clark, 392

Esquire, 32, 51, 53, 62, 81, 103-104, 118
editorial content of, 105
Petty Girls, 32, 116
on Playboy, 179, 302-303
EstEs, Clarissa Pinkola, 413
Exurbanites, The (Spectorsky), 91

“Fahrenheit 451” (Playboy), 80
Falcon Crest (CBS), 359
Faludi, Susan, 418

Falwell, Reverend Jerry, 325, 326, 327,
367, 370, 378
Family Circle, 408
Farber, David, 189
Farmer, James, 210
Farrell, Warren, 418

fashion, Playboy on, 79, 126, 127-128, 216
“Fast Times at Ridgemont High”
(Playboy), 351
Faulkner, William, 179
FBI, 140

Feather, Leonard, 102
Feiffer, Jules, 130, 212
Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 230,
246-247, 418

Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force
(FACT), 376

feminist movement, 228-229, 451
Christie Hefner and, 344
Hefner on Playboy as feminist
publication, 348

Meese Commission and, 367, 368-372,
373-381

Playboy on “equity feminism,” 247,
417-422, 453

Playboy on gender roles and, 230-235
post-World War II roles of women
and, 229-230

protests against Plaijboy by, 236-243,
245-249

on Stratten s death, 335
“Femlin” (Playboy), 97
Fiolipachi, Daniel, 302
Fisher, Murray, 193, 197, 199-200, 299,
307, 384

Fitzgerald, Ella, 95, 129, 135, 156

Fitzgerald, F, Scott, 56, 404, 431, 449

Flanagan, James, 341-342

Fleming, Ian, 152

Flynt, Larry, 325, 326

Focus on the Family (radio program), 268

Fonda, Jane, 311, 326

N D EX

519

Ford, Gerald R„ 269, 313
Ford, Henry, 452
Fortune, 73, 343
Fosse, Bob, 336

Fountainhead, The (Rand), 54^55
Fountain of Age (Friedan), 419
Franklin, Benjamin, 7, 125, 200, 218
Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The (NBC), 404
Friedan, Betty, 230, 246-247, 376, 418-419
Froehlich, Lee, 439
From the Back of the Bus (Gregory),
195-196

Frost, Mark, 405^06
Fulbright, J. William, 216

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 211, 212, 298
Gallagher Report, 305
Gallup, George, 44
Gaming Act (England), 336-340
Garcia, Miki, 373-374
Garroway, Dave, 41, 88
Gary, Reverend Richard, 185
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 452
Gateway Singers, 194
Gazzara, Ben, 334
“gender feminism,” 247, 418
Generation of Vipers (Wylie), 233
Getty, J. Paul, 194, 218-219
Gibbs, Wolcott, 130
Gibson, Charles, 116
Ginsberg, Allen, 74, 133
Ginzburg, Ralph, 178, 190
Girls Next Door, The (E! ), 443-446, 450
“Girls of Hollywood” (Playboy), 110
Goldberg, Arthur J., 216
Goldstein, Al, 325
Golson, G. Barry, 314
Good Housekeeping, 408
Goodman, Ellen, 330
Goodman, Paul, 194
Goo Hejfer (Hefner), 30, 32, 36, 38
Gordon, Virginia, 118-119
Gordy, Berry, 286, 360
Gore, Al, 442^43
Gottlieb, Lee, 320
Gould, Gleiss, and Benn, Inc., 77
Grabowski, Marilyn, 332, 333, 361, 363,
386, 396

Graham, Billy, 311

Graham, Sylvester, 107

Granaliam, Kathryn E., 139

Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 56, 449

Great Gorge Resort Hotel, 270, 316
Green, Robert L., 189
Greenburg, Dan, 307
Greene, Bob, 266, 292, 348-349
Gregory, Dick, 195
Griffith, Melanie, 307, 355
Grinnell College, 228
Guardian, 322
Guccione, Robert, 300-302
Guerrilla Theater, 228
Gutwillig, Robert, 271

Haden-Guest, Anthony, 276
Hahn, Jessica, 361, 365, 397
Haley, Alex, 196, 298, 307
Hamilton, Reverend William, 185
Hanson, Marcy, 281, 285
Harper, Don, 14
Harper’s Bazaar, 434
Harry, Deborah, 238
Haugland, Bob, 29
Hee Haw, 253, 256
Hefner, Christie (daughter), 327
on antipomography literature, 371
childhood of, 58, 81, 150
on father s health, 393
on “Me Generation,” 290
as PEI president, 342-345, 349, 353,
355, 410^14, 422-423, 439-440
on 7-Eleven ban of Playboy, 375
views on Leigh, 363

Hefner, Cooper Bradford (son), 403, 426
Hefner, David (son), 58, 150, 343, 363
Hefner, Glenn (father), 12-18, 19-20,

33, 36, 50

Hefner, Grace Swanson (mother), 12-18,
31-32, 41, 42, 243
financial support of Playboy by, 63
letters from Hefner to, 36, 50
Hefner, Hugh, 1-8, 107
army enlistment by, 34^-39
childhood of, 11-12, 14-27, 41
choking incident, 285
Dexedrine use by, 198-199, 221, 259,
265, 287, 341

documentaries about, 169-170, 173, 202
drug probe of, 258-270
early career of, 40, 49-56
early cartoons of, 15, 17, 30, 32, 36,
38,52

education of, 16, 28-33, 39^4, 48, 50,
54, 55, 61

520

INDEX

Hefner, Hugh ( continued )
first marriage, 50, 56-61, 120, 147-151
(see also Hefner, Millie Williams
(ex-wife))

game playing by, 17-18, 286-288, 360,
428, 441

on gender roles, 232-235, 236-237,
239, 243-249

in The Girls Next Door ; 443-446
group sex by, 59-60, 279-286, 363, 434
habits of, 99, 156, 266, 287, 394,
427-430, 440^42
“Hef” nickname of, 29
The Killing of the Unicom
(Bogdanovich) response of,

381-388, 393
legacy of, 447-454
management/work style of, 98-104,
189-193, 222

Meese Commission response of,
376-381

“Mr. Playboy” image of, 151-155,

162, 165

pofitical views of, 75-76, 137-142,
414^22

portrayed in Thy Neighbors Wife
(Talese), 328-331
reclusive lifestyle of, 197-201,

221-222, 349

resignation as president of PEI,
317-318, 423

second marriage of, 394-406, 407-408,
426^134 ( see also Hefner, Kimberly
Conrad (wife))

self-image of, 163-165, 173-174, 384
stroke suffered by, 385, 388, 391-394
See also Playboy ; Playboy Mansions;
“Playboy Philosophy” (Playboy);
individual names of family members;
individual names of girlfriends;
individual names of Playboy features
and business ventures
Hefner, Jason (grandfather), 24-25
Hefner, Keith (brother), 59, 63, 395, 441
childhood of, 14-15, 17-19, 24, 26, 37
Conrad-Hefner wedding and, 399, 405
on Playboy Mansion parties, 197
role of, in Playboy Clubs, 162, 191
views on Leigh, 363-364
Hefner, Kimberly Conrad (wife)

“Classic Kimberly” (Playboij), 407-408
courtship with Hefner, 394-399

marriage to Hefner, 400-406
separation from Hefner, 426-434
Hefner, Marston Glenn (son),

402^03, 426

Hefner, Milfie Wilfiams (ex-wife), 19,
38-39, 50, 56-61, 140, 343
courtship with Hefner, 42-48, 55, 244
on Hefners early career, 52
inception of Playboy and, 62-64
marriage to Hefner, 81, 82, 120,
147-151

Hefner, Rae (sister-in-law), 59
Hentoff, Nat, 196
Hepburn, Audrey, 334
Hertzberg, Hendrik, 379
heterosexuafity, Hefner on, 111-112
Hillman, Richard, 267
Hillman, Shirley, 261, 267
“History of the Sexual Revolution”
(Playboy), 421

HMH Publishing Company, 62, 83
Holland, Tim, 287
homosexuality

Hefners views on, 59-60, 112
Playboy on, 215
Honey, Ken, 332, 396
Hoogstraten, Dorothy Ruth. See Stratten,
Dorothy

Hoogstraten, Louise, 384—385, 387
Hooper, Debbie, 217
House, Daina, 281
Houston, Robert, 333-334
How Did a Nice Girl Like You Get into
This Business, 226

“How to Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying” (Playboy), 79
“How to Succeed with Women Without
Really Trying” (Playboy), 110-111
How to Win Friends and Influence
People (Carnegie), 108
Hudson, Henry E., 368
Hulbert, Ann, 22

Human Sexual Response (Masters,
Johnson), 215
Hunt, Morton, 241-243
Hustler, 325, 369
Hutton, Lauren, 238
Huxley, Sir Julian, 194

Imhoff, Carol, 222

Indianapolis, antipomography ordinance
proposed in, 371, 383

N D EX

521

individualism

Hefner on, 54-55, 138
Playboy editorial content on, 73-74
Irving, John, 376
Isham, Henry, 158

Jackson, Jennifer, 196

Jackson, Jesse, 212, 216, 218, 351

Jagger, Mick, 272-273

James Bond books/movies, 152

Javits, Jacob, 190, 216

Jenrette, John, 350

Jenrette, Rita, 350

Jensen, Debbie Svensk, 281

Jigs and Spike (Hefner), 15

Jim Malt (Hefner), 15

Johansen, Sharon, 253

John Baumgarth Calendar Company, 64

Johnson, Don, 355

Johnson, Lyndon B., 213

Johnson, Virginia, 179, 215

Jones, James, 80

Jordan, Tina, 433, 443

Joseph, Burt, 373

Kaminsky, James, 437-439

Karalus, Charlaine. See Pilgrim, Janet

Karloff, Boris, 17

Kasten, Shelly, 145

Keating, Charles, 411

Kelley, Paula, 301

Kempton, Sally, 236

Kennedy, John F„ 152, 153-154, 422

Kennedy, Robert F., 213, 217

Kent, Alan, 278

Kenton, Stan, 95, 99, 129, 135, 150, 157
Kerouac, Jack, 74, 131, 133-134
Kessie, Jack, 97, 103, 111, 126
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 351
Khrushchev, Nikita, 137
Kiger, Susan, 281

Killing of the Unicom: Dorothy Stratten,
The (Bogdanovich), 381-388, 393
King, Alexander, 234
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 154, 195, 213,
216, 217

Kinsey, Alfred, 304

Sexual Behavior in the Human Fenmle,
44, 108-109, 230

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ,
44-A8, 108-109
Kinsey Institute, 179

Kirk, Russell, 173

“Kitchen Debates,” 137

Klein, Barbara. See Benton, Barbi

Knight, Arthur, 189

Knight Ridder, Inc., 318

Korda, Michael, 353

Krask, Skip, 145

Kretchmer, Arthur, 305-306, 308, 313,
351-352, 387

executive editor appointment of,
299-300

retirement of, 437-439
K-Tel, 424

Kunstler, William, 216

“lad books,” 437
Ladbrokes Ltd., 338
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence),
56, 293

Lajoie, Mary Ann, 146
Lake Geneva (Wisconsin) Playboy
Resort, 224
Larson, Roy, 180
Lasch, Christopher, 219
Lawford, Peter, 153, 266, 277, 278
Lawrence, D. H., 12, 56, 293
Lawrence, Vint, 348
Leaf, Earl, 146
Lear, Norman, 164
Lears, Jackson, 80
Leary, Timothy, 211, 311, 326
Lederer, Howard, 305
Lederer, Laura, 371
legal issues

drug probe of Hefner, 258-270
Mansfield pictorial and, 200
PEI gaming operations and,

336-342

plagiarism issues, 175-176
Playboy Club liquor license and, 191
See also Meese Commission;
pornography

Lehrman, Nat, 175-176, 193-194, 203,
299, 349, 352
Leibovitz, Annie, 434
Leigh, Carrie, 360-366, 391, 393,

394, 395

Lennon, John, 351
Lerner, Max, 207, 210, 212, 312
Letts, Arthur, 274
Levine, Ellen, 368, 378
Lewinsky, Monica, 422

522

INDEX

Life, 31, 188, 191, 203, 234
on Conrad-Hefner marriage, 402
on Playboy’s treatment of women, 239
“The Good Life” issue (1959), 73
Lindeland, Liv, 301
Listen America! (Falwell), 326
Look, 46, 188, 204, 210
Lorre, Peter, 17

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 276
Los Angeles Times, 275, 348, 385, 436
Louis Harris and Associates, 315
Love: A Special Playboy Issue (Playboy),
354-355

Love Boat, The, 253
Lovelace, Linda, 371-372
Loving, Candy, 291
Loving, Lisa, 364, 383-384
Lownes, Tom, 260-261
Lownes, Val, 256

Lownes, Victor A„ III, 135, 143, 145,
154, 201

England gaming operation and,
336-339

on gender roles, 232
on Hefners Dexedrine use, 198-199
hiring of, 93-96, 98
PEI changes by, 316-317, 320
on Playboy Clubs, 160
on Playboy content, 103, 123-124
on Playboifs Penthouse, 194—195
resignation of, 191
Lowry, Kathy, 307
Lugosi, Bela, 17
Luncheon Date, 53
“Lust for Life” ( Playboy promotional
campaign), 314
Luther, Martin, 183
Lynch, David, 405-406

Macbeth (movie), 270
Macdonald, Dwight, 74
MacKillop, Brenda, 374
MacKinnon, Catharine, 370-372, 378,
383, 417
Mad, 171-172

Maddox, Cynthia, 201-203, 245, 260
Mademoiselle, 239
Madison, Holly, 433, 434, 443-446
Magazine Publishers Association, 375
Mailer, Norman, 5, 190, 194, 197,

234, 306

Malamuth, Neil, 378

Male Animal, The, 448
Maltin, Leonard, 412
“Man and Woman” (Playboy),

313-314, 355

“Man at His Leisure” (Plaijboy), 97
“Manipulators, The” (Playboy), 141
“Manly Nights,” 428, 441
Mansfield, Jayne, 189, 200
“Mansion Misses,” 281-282
“Mantrack: A Guys Guide to Changing
Times ’’(Playboy), 413
“Man Track” (Playboy/Boper), 412-413
Mapplethorpe, Bobert, 417
Marcuse, Herbert, 216
Margulies, Stanley, 163
marijuana, 259, 266, 279, 326
Mario, Thomas, 79, 111, 189
Marisol, 208
Marks, Henry, 352
Marquardt, Bridget, 433, 443-446
marriage

Hefner’s views on, 359, 397
“Miss Gold-digger of 1953” (Playboy),
72, 78, 119, 233

Playboy on gender roles and, 231, 233
“Playboy Philosophy” on, 181
Martin, Dean, 153
Masters, William, 179, 215
Mastro, John, 86-87, 99, 100
Mathews, George, 265
Mattis, Joni, 148, 149-150, 201, 396
Maugham, W. Somerset, 80
McCall’s, 241
McCann, Chuck, 365, 441
McCann, Pam, 354
McCarthy, Eugene, 212, 213, 217
McCarthy, Jenny, 411, 435
McCarthy, Joseph, 139
McCarthyism, 75, 139-140
McCullough, Julie, 365
McDonald, Diane, 354
McGovern, George, 217, 275, 311
McGuire, Patti, 281, 286, 313
McVeigh, Timothy, 416
Mead, Shepherd, 79, 110-111, 231-232
“Me Decade,” 288-294, 314-315, 352
Meese, Edwin, 6, 368, 377-378
Meese Commission, 367, 368-372,
373-381

Mencken, H. L„ 107
“Men” (Playboy), 355-356
“Mens Shop” (Playboy), 124

N D EX

523

Merkin, Daphne, 445-446
Miami Magazine, 319-320
Michele, Donna, 201
Midsummer Nights Dream Party, 278,
358, 403^04

Mike Wallace Interview, The, 105-106
Miller, Arv, 64
Miller, Phil, 146
Millett, Kate, 247

Minneapolis, antipomography ordinance
proposed in, 371, 383
Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 154
Minsky, Harold, 110
“Miss Gold-digger of 1953” (Playboy),

72, 78, 119, 233
Mitchelson, Marvin, 365, 366
“Mixing the Perfect Martini” (Playboy),
125-126

Monroe, Marilyn, 64, 69, 71, 72, 110,
114, 350

Moral Majority, 325-328, 351, 368, 414
Moral Majority Report (Moral
Majority), 326
Morehouse, Ward, 130
Morgan, Robin, 370
Morton, Arnold, 160-161
Morton, Elaine, 217
Most, The, 169-170, 173, 202
Motive, 180
Motorola, 442
Motown, 360

Mount, Anson “Smoky,” 97, 130, 146,
184-185

Mozes, Denise, 282
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 448
Mueller, Lillian, 253, 282
Muggeridge, Malcolm, 188
Myers, Cynthia, 222

NAACP Image Awards, 279
Naked Ape, The, 270
Napolitano, Christopher, 439
Nation, 106

National Association of Evangelicals, 368
National Federation for Decency, 369
National Heritage Foundation, 324
National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws (NORML), 266,
279, 326

National Organization for Women
(NOW), 247, 248, 344
National Religious Broadcasters, 326

National Review, 292, 379, 436
“Navigating the Nineties: The P.C.

Survival Guide” (Playboy), 416
NBC, 208-209, 291, 404
Neiman, LeRoy, 97-98, 99, 189
“New Comics,” 140-141
New Publications Group (PEI), 343
New Republic, 347-348, 379, 385
Newsday, 209, 436
Newsweek, 305
on Hefner, 170, 207, 352
on Playboy interview of Carter, 312
“The Party’s Over,” 346-347
Newton, Helmut, 395
New Yorker, 90, 92, 106, 132, 171
New York Herald Tribune, 187
New York State Liquor Authority 191
New York Times, 269, 270, 380
New York Times Magazine, 290
Nicholson, Jack, 277, 280
Night Reat, 82

Nixon, Richard, 137, 213, 217
enemies’ list of, 259, 268, 311
Watergate, 309
Nizzari, Joyce, 147-148, 154
Noel, William, 265
Norman, Greg, 350

Northwestern University, 50, 54, 55, 83
Novak, Dorothy, 29, 31

Oates, Joyce Carol, 248-249, 411

O’Connor, Father Norman, 185

O’Connor, Maty, 272, 363, 364-4165, 392

Oh! Calcutta! (play), 215

Olson, Gale, 222

Olson, Hope, 253, 281

Once Upon a Time, 405^06

One Nation, After All (Wolfe), 409

Ono, Yoko, 351

“Open Season on Rachelors”

(Playboy), 119

Ordeal: An Autobiography (Lovelace), 371
O’Toole, Peter, 277
Oui, 270, 302

Out ofRondage (Steinem), 372

Packard, Vance, 141, 190
Paglia, Camille, 247, 419^20, 450
Paisley, Jessica, 432-433
Palms, The (Las Vegas), 440
Pappangelis, Pat, 86, 100
Pappas, Pat, 146

524

INDEX

Parents , 22-23

Parker, Charlie “Bird,” 129

Parsons, Wayne, 228-229

“Party Jokes” (Playboy), 72, 86, 111, 411

“Party’s Over, The” (Newsweek), 346-347

Paul, Art, 63-64, 69-71, 86, 87, 100,

146, 222

Peale, Norman Vincent, 74
Pennies From Heaven, 397-398
Pennington, Janice, 253
Penthouse, 300-302, 369
People, 256, 400

People for the American Way, 370
People of Plenty (Potter), 73
Pepper, Tracy, 414
Perlis, Michael, 410, 423-425
“Personal Playmates,” 282
Petersen, James, 371
Petty, George, 32, 116
“Photographing Your Own Playmate”
(Playboy), 140
“Photoplays” (Hefner), 17
Piastre, Joe, 405

“Pigskin Preview” (Playboy), 97, 130, 190
Pilgrim, Janet, 115, 128, 146, 147, 150
“Pious Pomographers, The”

(Playboy), 113

Pitner, Marjorie, 86, 100, 146
Plato’s Retreat, 303
Playboy, 2

art direction of, 86, 192
audience of, 75-78, 120, 132-136,

177, 301

circulation of, 80-81, 103-104, 192,
250, 297

competition of, 297-306, 437
on consumerism, 73, 108, 111,
123-132, 137, 297-298, 308-309,
450-453

early merchandising by, 131, 191-192
early staffing of, 85, 86-98
editorial direction of, 73-74, 78-80,
90-93, 101-104, 189-193, 306-316,
350-357, 353, 408^14, 437-439
fiction in, 72, 80, 90-93, 131, 190 (see
also individual titles of works)
fiftieth anniversary of, 435-440
first feature of Hefner in, 151-155
on gender roles, 230-235, 239,
355-356, 412-413, 451
Hefner on goals of, 305
inception of, 3, 62-65, 69-75, 80-82

logo of, 64, 87

office culture of, 145-146, 317
offices of, 98, 132, 191-192, 209, 423
photography by, 86, 89, 115, 301-302
“Playboy Philosophy” and, 174—186
political coverage by, 210-212,
310-313, 351-352, 411^112
on sports, 97, 129-130, 350
See also advertising; Hefner, Hugh;
Playboy Enterprises Inc.; individual
names of employees; individual
names of magazine articles and
features

“Playboy Advisor” (Playboy), 189, 192, 307
Playboy After Dark (CBS), 224-225, 273
“Playboy After Hours” (Playboy), 79,

111, 130, 190
Playboy Books, 344
Playboy Building, 191-192, 209
Playboy Bunnies
“jet bunnies,” 210
Playboy Clubs and, 161-162
Steinem article about, 237-239
Steve Allen Show feature of, 172
See also Playboy; Playboy Clubs;
“Playmate of the Month” (Playboy)
Playboy Channel, 349-350, 359, 424
Playboy Clubs, 93, 131, 155, 160-163,
190-191, 192, 195
in Las Vegas (2004), 440
Lownes and, 316, 321
“Memo to New Bunny Mothers,” 262
overexpansion of, 270
Playboy Club Bunny Manual, 162, 237
Playboy Clubs International, 206-208,
336-340

Steinem article about, 237-239
See also Playboy Enterprises Inc.
“Playboy Coloring Book, The”

(parody), 232
Playboy.com, 440
Playboy Enterprises Inc.

financial problems of, 270-271, 294,
316-322, 344-345, 349-350, 422,
423^25

gaming operations of, 336-342,

350, 440

growth of, in early 1970s, 250-251
Playboy’s continuing role in, 439
See also Hefner, Christie (daughter);
Playboy; individual names of
business ventures

N D EX

525

“Playboy Forum” {Playboy), 179-180,
184, 190, 218,411

Playboy Foundation, 179-180, 266, 304
Playboy Hotel and Casino (Atlantic City),
340-342, 350

Playboy International Writers
Convocation, 298

“Playboy Interview” (Playboy), 190, 196,
307, 411

of Betty Friedan, 418H19
of Camille Paglia, 419-420
of Jimmy Carter, 312-313, 328
political coverage and, 210-211, 216
Playboy Jazz Festival (1959), 95,

135-136

Playboy Jazz Poll (Playboy), 129
Playboy Mansions, 6-7
Chicago, purchase/design of, 158-160
Conrad-Hefner marriage and,

401-404, 427

feminist protests at, 228-229, 242
game playing at, 286-288, 360, 428, 441
grotto of, 275, 280, 281
group sex at, 279-286
“Me Decade” and, 288-294
“The Chicago Mansion” (Playboy),
199-200

“The Happening,” 223-224
West (Los Angeles), purchase/design
of, 197, 250, 272-279
Playboy on the Scene (Playboy
Channel), 359

“Playboy Panel” (Playboy), 190
“Playboy Philosophy” (Playboy), 5, 113,
120, 193, 291
creation of, 174-180
on religion, 180-186
“Playboy Reader: His Lust Is for Life”
(Playboy), 309

“Playboy Reader Service” (Playboy), 128
“Playboy Report on American Men”
(Louis Harris and Associates), 315
Playboy Roller Disco and Pajama Party,
The (ABC), 279, 333
“Playboys Bazaar” (Playboy), 124
“Playboys Doctrine of Male”

(Playboy), 185

“Playboys House Party” (Playboy), HO
Playboy’s Penthouse, 131, 155-158,
194-195

“Playboys Penthouse Apartment”
(Playboy), 111, 126

“Playboys Playmate House Party”
(Playboy), 279-280
Playboy’s Playmate Party (ABC), 279
Playboy’s Roller Disco and Pajama Party
(ABC), 291
Playboy Store, 424

“Playboys Yacht Party” (Playboy), 110

Playboy Tours, 191

Playboy Towers Hotel (Chicago),

298, 316

“Playmate of the Month” (Playboy), 46,
314-315, 411
African Americans as, 196
“Death of a Playmate” (Carpenter),
335-336 (see also Stratten, Dorothy)
inception of, 114-122
photography of, 89, 307
“Playboy’s Playmate House Party,”
279-280

Playmate Data Sheet, 307, 348
Playmate Reunion, 278
political activism by, 217
Video Playmates, 359
See also Playboy; individual names of
Playmates
Playtique, 343
Plimpton, George, 212
Plotz, David, 434
PM East, 172

Polanski, Roman, 224, 270, 278, 338
“political correctness,” 414—422
Pollock, Adrienne, 266
pornography
Hefner on, 305

Meese Commission on, 367, 368-372,
373-381

“Reagan Revolution” and, 325
“The Pious Pornographers”

(Playboy), 113
Porter, Cole, 102
Potter, David, 73
Potter, Dennis, 448
Power of Positive Thinking, The
(Peale), 74

Powers, Steve, 403, 405
“Prayboy: Entertainment for

Far-Righteous Men” (parody), 327
Preminger, Otto, 190
Presley, Elvis, 74, 109, 291
Preuss, Robert, 40, 46, 271
PTL Club, 361
“Pubic Wars,” 301-302

526

INDEX

Publishers Development Corporation,

51, 60, 62, 89

Pulse: The Pictu re Magazine of Chicago, 53

Purdy, Ken, 91

Puritanism, Hefner on, 11

Pursuit of Pleasure, The (NBC), 208-209

Quindlen, Anna, 380

“Rabbit Pack,” 286

race relations, 22, 37, 50, 194-197, 210
Rand, Ayn, 53, 54—55
Randall, Steve, 439
Raphaelson, Samson, 40
Rat Pack, 152-153, 154
Rea, Gardner, 111, 130
Reagan, Ronald, 141, 251, 324-328, 331,
347, 352

Khomeini and, 351

Meese Commission and, 367, 368-372,
373-381
Realist, 178

“Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche”

(Playboy), 356
Reems, Harry, 325
Reisman, Judith, 369-370
religion

Carter interview and, 312-313
Hefner childhood influence, 11, 18-27
Hefner on gender roles and, 236, 239
Hefner on sexuality and, 55
Playboy on “radical potential in
Christianity,” 216
“Playboy Philosophy” on, 180-186
“Reagan Revolution” and, 324—328
See also religion
Religious Roundtable, 326
“Return of Designing Women, The”
(Playboy), 355

reversible ischemic neurological deficit
(RIND), 392

Revue of Stars (Hefner, Rrophy), 61
Reynolds, Alison, 282, 360, 432
Rhodes, Richard, 310
Richards, Ann, 150
Richards, Keith, 272-273
Ridgely, Rob, 441
Rigby, Julie, 413-414
Ritter, John, 334

Robertson, Reverend Pat, 370, 378, 416
Rochelle Printing, 69
Rockefeller, Nelson, 311

Rockefeller Foundation, 22
Rockwell, George Lincoln, 196
Rockwell, John, 286
Roderick, Rrande, 432—433
Roe v. Wade, 179-180
Roiphe, Katie, 418
Roller, Douglas P, 259
Rolling Stone (magazine), 247, 276, 293,
301, 360, 442

Rolling Stones (band), 272-273
Roosevelt, Franklin, 422, 452
Root, Gloria, 217
Roots (Haley), 307
Roper Poll, 412
Rose, Charlie, 352
Rosenzweig, Dick, 199, 263
“Rousing Return of Romance, The”
(Playboy), 313
Royko, Mike, 322
Rubin, Jerry, 220, 353
Rundle, Cis, 323, 363
Russell, Ray, 86-89, 91, 97, 100-101,

143, 145-146, 155, 199
Rutherford, Blake (Jack Kessie), 97,

111, 126

Sacramento Bee, 398

Saewert, Harold, 14

Saewert, Russell, 14

Safire, William, 269

Saginor, Mark, 392, 428

Sahl, Mort, 115, 135-136, 140-141,

160, 177

Sanchez, Loretta, 442-443
Sandstone, 303-304, 307
Sapstein, Ira, 264

Saturday Evening Post, 171, 173, 214, 232

Saturday Night Live (NBC), 291

Schaap, Nelly, 384-385, 387

Schacove, Gene, 286

Scharf, Ron, 258, 264

Schauer, Frederick, 368, 378

Scheer, Robert, 375, 411

Schickel, Richard, 144

Schlafly, Phyllis, 325, 370

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr„ 211, 275, 298

Schlicker, Shelly, 242-243

“Schlong Show,” 278

Schulberg, Rudd, 56

Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 279

Scott, Susie, 351

Screen Actors Guild, 141

N D EX

527

Screw, 325

Sears, Alan E., 374-375, 379
Seipp, Catherine, 436
self-fulfillment, 220-221, 288-294,
314-315, 448, 452^54
Sellers, Eldon, 58, 59-60, 69-70, 81,

100, 146

inception of Playboy and, 62-64, 86
Lownes and, 94, 95
Sellers, Janie, 29, 59, 81, 146
Serling, Rod, 242
7-Eleven, 375-376
Sex and History, 175-176
Sex and the Law, 175-176
“Sex Behavior and the U.S. Law”
(Hefner), 55

Sex in America (University of
Chicago), 409

“Sex in Cinema” (Playboy), 411
“Sex Is Back” (Playboy), 421
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(Kinsey), 44, 108-109, 230
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(Kinsey), 44^18, 108-109, 230
“Sexual Behavior in the 1970s”

(Playboy), 304

“Sexual Freedom League,” 215
“Sexual Offense Policy” (Antioch
College), 415

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence
from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
(Paglia), 419-420
Sexual Politics (Millett), 247
“Sexual Revolution,” 105-114, 121-122,
206-212, 215

feminist criticism of Playboy and, 235,
245-249
Hefner on, 352
media criticism of, 293-294
Playboy on (1989), 356-357
Shaft (University of Illinois at Urbana),
40, 45-46
Shalit, Gene, 40
Shepard, Bill, 441
Shoiv Business Illustrated, 162-163
Shower, Kathy, 354
“Shudder Club,” 17
Shudder (Hefner), 17
Sidney, Suzanne, 146
Silverstein, Shel, 99, 145, 203, 224, 254,
264, 286
Simon, Ernie, 53

Simpson, O. J., 417

Sinatra, Frank, 129, 150, 152-153, 154, 160

Siskel, Gene, 254, 264

Skinner, Samuel K., 269-270

Smith, Anna Nicole, 411

Snider, Paul, 332-336, 381-388

Sobran, M. J„ 292

Sokol, Erich, 111

Sommers, Christina Hoff, 247, 418
Sorensen, Theodore, 217
Southern, Terry, 194
Southland Corporation, 375-376
Spanfeller, James, 423
Spectorsky, Auguste Comte, 90-93, 98,
100, 103, 158, 159, 222
death of, 298-299, 310-311
on Hefners Dexedrine use, 198
interviews of, 172
on “Playboy Philosophy,” 176
Spectorsky, Theo, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100,
158, 176

Spice Entertainment, 425

Spice Network, 440

Spock, Benjamin, 279

Squires, Susan, 355

St. Pierre, Monique, 281-282, 285

Stag, 64

Stag Party, 62-65

Star 80, 336

Stein, Cyril, 338

Steinbeck, John, 80, 131

Steinem, Gloria, 5-6, 237-239, 241, 372

Steinmetz High School, 28-33, 61

Steve Allen Show, The, 172

Stevenson, Adlai, 140

Stewart, Anne, 361, 364, 394, 395, 427, 431

Stewart, Dick, 363, 394, 395, 427, 431

Stocks, 337-338

Stratten, Dorothy, 323-324, 331-336,
381-388, 396
Strauss, Murray, 378
Streisand, Barbra, 362
Stroup, Keith, 265, 326
Summerfield, Arthur, 82-83
Swanson, Grace. See Hefner, Grace
Swanson (mother)

“swingers,” 214

Tajiri, Vince, 86, 89, 98, 99, 146, 222
Take Back the Night: Women on
Pornography (Lederer), 371
Talese, Gay, 328-331

528

INDEX

Tannen, Holly, 236

Tannenbaum, Rabbi Marc, 185

Tanqueray, 442

Taylor, M. J„ 320

Tellefson, Warren, 14

Terry and the Pirates (Caniff), 27

Tewksbury, Jill, 222

That Toddlin’ Town: A Rowdy Burlesque
of Chicago Manners and, Morals
(Hefner), 52^3
“theater of the nude,” 215
“The Happening,” 223-224
Theodore, Sondra, 283-285, 286, 288,
357, 398^00

“Theory of Mass Culture, A”
(Macdonald), 74
They All Laughed, 334
Thomas, Cal, 378, 435
Thompson, Hunter S., 310
Thompson, James, 259, 264—270
Thy Neighbors Wife (Talese), 328-331
Time, 45, 171, 208, 255-256, 373, 380,
409, 436

Times Magazine (London), 436
Tobias, Andrew, 354
Torme, Mel, 441
Townhall.com, 435
“Tragedy of Youth, A” (Life), 31
Traynor, Chuck, 371-372
Treacher, Sir John, 339
Trikilis, Michael, 280-281, 286
Trilling, Lionel, 92
Trudeau, Garry, 402
Trumbo, Dalton, 141
Trump , 132

“Truth About Cocaine, The” (Playboy),
266-267
TV Guide, 157

Tweed, Shannon, 341, 358-360, 398,
399^00
Tyler, Buffy, 433
Tyson, Mike, 350

University of Chicago, 409, 417
University of Illinois at Urbana, 39-44, 48
University of Southern California,

240-241

University of Virginia, 417
“Upbeat Generation,” 134-135, 172-173
Updike, John, 210, 291, 306, 376, 411
UPI, 154

Urry, Michelle, 263

U.S. Army, 34-39

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA),
256-258, 264-270
U.S. Justice Department, 369
U. S. News and World Report, 132
U.S. Post Office, 82-83, 108

Vanity Fair, 434
Vanocur, Sander, 209
Vargas, Alberto, 32, 116, 202
Verola, Marina, 354
Viagra, 432, 434
Vickers, Yvette, 134
Victoria Sporting Club, 337
Vidal, Gore, 291
video technology, advent of, 306
Vieira, Peter, 441

Vietnam Moratorium Committee, 242
Village Voice, 195, 266, 335-336
VIP: The Playboy Club Magazine, 161
Vonnegut, Kurt, 376
Von Rosen, George, 51
“Vote for Polygamy, A” (Playbotj),
119-120

Waite, Heather, 285

Wakefield, Dan, 194

Wallace, George, 213

Wallace, Mike, 82, 105-106, 116, 172

Wall Street Journal, 171, 317

Warren, Mary, 201, 203-208

Watergate, 309

Waugh, Evelyn, 79

Wax, Sheldon, 193, 299

WBKB, 131, 157-158

“We Decade,” 410

What Makes Sammy Run (Schulberg), 56
“What Playboy Doesn’t Know About
Women Could Fill a Book”
(McCall’s), 241

“Why Men Die Young” ( Playboy ), 419

Wilder, Billy, 130

Wildmon, Reverend Donald, 369,

375, 414

Wilkinson, Kendra, 443
Will, George, 292-293, 352, 446
William Morrow, 382
Williams, Millie. See Hefner, Millie
Williams (ex-wife)

Williamson, Bruce, 412
Wilson, Galian, 130
Winchell, Lynn, 211

N D EX

529

Winters, Jonathan, 93
Winters, Lisa, 118, 146
Winthrop, John, 325
Wodehouse, P. G„ 131, 211
Wolfberg, Lee, 145, 225, 286
Wolfe, Alan, 409
Wolfe, Bernard, 163
Wolfe, Tom, 5, 187-188, 205, 208,
288-289, 290

“Womanization of America, The”
(Playboy), 233-234
Women Against Pornography, 370,
371,378

“Women Against Sex” (Playboy), 371
Women Against Violence in Pornography
and Media, 370

“Women at War” (Playboy), 371
“Women” (Playboy), 355
womens movement. See feminist
movement

womens rights. See feminist movement
Womongold, Marcia, 371
Woodward, Bob, 309, 351

workplace

pay inequality, 237
Playboy office culture, 145-146, 317
Playboy on gender roles and, 231-232
post-WWII roles of women in,
229-230

“World of Playboy” (Playboy), 290-291,
412, 431^32

World War II, 34-439, 49, 229-230
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 88
Writers Digest, 80
Wylie, Philip, 233

X, Malcolm, 196

Yagalla, Mark, 433
York, Marilou, 281
Yorkin, Bud, 164
“yuppies,” 353

Ziegfeld Girls, 116

Zollo, Burt, 53, 62, 63, 102-103, 119

Zuziak, Betty, 147-150, 155

Hefner roller-skating with (left to right) Playmates Terri Welles, Candy Collins,
and Victoria Cooke during Playboy’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in
September 1979

Hefner dancing with Linda Brava and Playmatejaime Bergman at the Playboy
Mansion in 1998 following his marital separation

Left to right: model Chris Cranston, Hefner, and Nancy Boberts on the set of
Playboy After Dark in the late 1960s

Centerfold: Hefner and “The Girls Next Door” in 2007: (left to right)
Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson

Goo Hejfer, the
cartoon autobiography
that Hefner began as
a teenager in the early
1940s

“Playboys Penthouse
Apartment,” a 1956
article that exemplified
the magazine s message
of consumer abundance

Hefner inspecting bunnies for the new Chicago Playboy Club in 1960

Harvey Cox, William F. Buckley, and Hefner at the Chicago Mansion during the
filming of the 1967 NBC television special The Pursuit of Pleasure

The thirty-seven-
story Playboy
Building on
Chicago’s Michigan
Avenue with its
trademark beacon
in the late 1960s

“The Big Bunny,”
Hefner’s black,
specially modified
DC-9 jet, in flight

Playboy meets the
counterculture in this
September 1970
cover, with a shapely
peace activist and a
smorgasbord of pieces
on controversial social
issues

The Playboy Mansion
West, which Hefner
purchased in 1971
and immediately
began to overhaul.

Hefner and his
girlfriends watch the
Village People perform
at The Playboy Roller
Disco and Pajama
Party, a 1979 ABC
television special
filmed at the mansion

Hefner at the Playmate of the Year reunion at Playboy’s twenty-fifth anniversary
celebration in 1979

Dorothy Stratten with Hefner at the announcement that she had been chosen to
be Playmate of the Year in April 1980

Hugh and Christie Hefner,
twenty-nine, not long after
he appointed her president
of Playboy Enterprises, Inc.,
in 1982

Kimberly Conrad Hefner,
Hugh Hefner, and their
sons, Marston and Cooper,
at the Playboy Mansion
in the mid-1990s

Hefner and his “Party Posse” of platinum-haired girlfriends at the unveiling of his
likeness at the Hollywood Wax Museum in 2001

A collection of body-painted girls poses with Hefner at his annual Halloween
party in 2002

Grace and Glenn Hefner with
their sons, Hugh and Keith, in
the early 1930s Hefner at age eight

The Skull Tries Revenge,
one of many series of
adventure and horror
cartoons that Hefner
drew as a boy

: <s»nt3 nmh m 1 '*'

A teenage “Hep Hef ’ with
two female friends from
Steinmetz High School

Hefner during his stint
in the United States
Army (1945-1946)

Hefner and girlfriend
Millie Williams at a
college dance

One of Hefner’s ribald
cartoons for Shaft, a publica-
tion run by students at the
University of Illinois

DUR ANSWER
TO THE CAHPIIS
FEMALE 5MRTAEE

(SIS AN AID TO THE TRAGIC FIVE TO ONE HALE-FEMALE
RATIO ON CAMPUS, SHAFTS 50CJ EDITOR
PRESENTS SOME TIMELY ADVICE TO T HE UNHAPPY
MAJORITY GRO UP- THE MEN-

the forget *ew"technipue.

if you can’t find a woman, the
BEST WIND TO DO IS FORGET 'EM.
FoRTHOSE WHO FIND FORGETTING
•EM DIFFICULT, WE SUGGEST
TH IS EAST chart

WITH WHICH YOU
CAN FORGET 'EM
ONE PART AT A
TIME. WORK FROM
THE PARTS EASI-
EST TO FORGET TO
THOSE MOST
DI FFI C Ul ~

GUVS COIN G STEADY.
IT'S NOT MUCH
G-OOD TO THE
REST OF US._

RfOlREcT YovR INTERESTS
INTO OTHER CHANNELS.
THINK ABOUT THAT
EXCITING NEW PHYSICS
THEORY, op. THAT
INTRIGUING CHAPTER
IN ECONOMICS.
AFTER ALL, THERE
ARE OTHER THINGS
TVS T AS IMPORTANT
AS SEX- I
Tuw.

IINGS couldbe worse! a RECENT
JRVEY BY SHAFT'S TREE EDITOR PIS-

Hefner as a crooner — the “Campus Ballad King” — during his college days

The youthful editor at
his desk during the early
days of Playboy in 1954

Hefner with A. C. Spectorsky,
Playboy’s influential editorial
director

“What Sort of Man
Reads Playboy ?” — a
promotional cam-
paign that stressed
the magazine s
vision of the good
life for young,
upwardly mobile
young men

Hefner on the set of his first television show. Playboy’s Penthouse, in the late 1950s

ALCOHOLISM

^'o-rg rnisj/recu

fMORttow

VWete^L ^scutes

iivontf

Hefner pounding out “The Playboy Philosophy” for the magazine in the early 1960s

Hefner and girlfriend Cynthia Maddox at the opening of the New York Playboy
Club in December 1962

Hefner and guests dancing at a Playboy Mansion party in Chicago

Hefner working on his famous revolving bed in the Chicago Mansion

Hefner and girlfriend
Barbi Benton shortly
after they met in 1968

Hefner hosting a fundraiser for the antiwar presidential candidate Eugene
McCarthy at the Chicago Mansion in 1968

Hefner with Karen Christy, the other point in the love triangle with Barbi Benton,
in the early 1970s

Bobbie Arnstein playing Monopoly with Hefner aboard the Big Bunny before her
tragic demise

Playboy’s 1977 “Lust
for Life” campaign,
which attempted to
reconnect the maga-
zine to a post-1960s,
post-political activist
generation

Shooting a 1977 ABC television special. Playboy’s Playmate Party, poolside at the
Playboy Mansion West

Playboy Enterprises president Derick Daniels addressing a stockholder’s meeting

Left to right: Hefner, Playboy Clubs International president Amie Morton, and
Victor Lownes touring the Great Gorge Resort Hotel in New Jersey

Playboy’s blistering 1986
attack, “Inside the Meese
Commission” (complete
with a caricature of attor-
ney general Edwin
Meese) — part of Hefners
battle with the Reagan
Administration

y ROBERT SCHEER

how a group of zealots look aim at pornography
and ended up in a war against sex itself

mmm

THE MEESE

COMMISSION

The 1985 press conference where Hefner publicly denounced Peter Bogdanovich
for his reaction to the Dorothy Straiten murder

Hefner and his fiancee, Kimberly Conrad, in an 1989 interview

Hefner and his “Manly Night” buddies in the mid-1990s

Hefner and Gloria Steinem being inducted into the Magazine Hall of Fame in 1998

Praise for Steven Watts’s

The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century

“Intelligent, thorough, and engaging. . . . The implicit claim of Watts’s admirable book is
almost inarguable — that it’s impossible to understand twentieth-century America without
knowing the story of Henry Ford.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Ford has had many biographers. . . . None, however, comes close to Steven Watts. . . .
He brilliantly reveals the nature of Ford’s genius.” — Chicago Tribune

“An energetic and altogether fascinating look at an eccentric genius who helped
make modern America.” — Los Angeles Times

“Watts’s judicious exploration of the feats and foibles of Henry Ford provides a timely and
compelling model of how to cut through the hype and tell the real story.” — The Washington Post

Praise for Steven Watts’s

The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life

“Gives us a vivid portrait of the man behind Mickey Mouse, while at the same time
situating his anomalous achievement within a social and aesthetic context. . . .

A terrifically readable and illuminating book.” — The New York Times

“A treasure trove of information on the Disney enterprise. ... An invaluable mine of
material on how the American century became the Disney century.” — Los Angeles Times

“An excellent book. ... A subtle, generous-minded account of
Walt Disney’s legacy.” — The Economist (London)

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